


This Time Around

by Rainne



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Demon possession, F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mental Health Issues, Not comics compliant, Post-Canon, Post-Chosen, References to Depression, Suicide Attempt, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-15
Updated: 2006-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:28:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 26,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24276637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rainne/pseuds/Rainne
Summary: Buffy's had a rough go of it since the destruction of Sunnydale. Estranged from her Watcher and her friends, she's now retired and lives in Rome.  But then she gets a chance to change it all.
Relationships: Rupert Giles/Buffy Summers
Comments: 21
Kudos: 41





	1. Be Careful What You Wish For

**Author's Note:**

> This one's from the deep archives, folks. I originally posted it to LiveJournal back in 2006 - or possibly earlier; I'm not exactly sure. Anyway, I hope it's aged well.

Giovanni Rosario gave a small frown when the door of his little Roman bistro opened and the blonde woman entered. It wasn’t that she was a bad customer. She always paid her bill and tipped generously; was quiet and well-mannered, unlike most Americans who came into his place; never misbehaved or caused a fuss. The problem was that she drank. Not like an Italian, oh no, or even like a Frenchman. The blonde woman drank like she had just crawled across ten miles of desert and the bottles contained not potent red wine but sweet fresh water. She would occupy the table in the darkest back corner of Giovanni’s little establishment, order a tiny pasta dish and barely touch it, and drink a bottle or two of his best strong red wine, then sway out the door at the end of the night and vanish into the bowels of Rome. He worried about her.

Tonight, though, was different from the two or three hundred previous in Giovanni’s memory over the last three years. Tonight, aside from being dressed to kill, she chose a table in the center of the room, in the light, and ordered a bottle of white wine and two glasses. She poured a glass for herself and sipped it contemplatively, her eyes fastened to the door. Giovanni watched her for about an hour before his curiosity got the better of him and he approached her. “Signorina,” he said softly, “how do you do this evening?”

She smiled at him - another rare thing. She had a beautiful smile which she rarely used. Then she spoke to him in her fluent but American-accented Italian. “I’m good,” she said. “Really good. He’s coming tonight. He said he would.”

Giovanni raised an eyebrow. “He?”

She nodded. “He’s in Rome. He came for my sister, to see her graduate from John Cabot, but he said he’d come here and see me, too. He promised.”

Giovanni took in her face and realized that she was actually radiating excitement. He had never seen her so before. Then her eyes shifted to something behind him. Giovanni turned. In the doorway stood a tall, broad-shouldered man in a brown suit with glasses and dark, silver-shot hair. This man looked nervous and uncomfortable.

The young signorina raised a tentative hand in greeting and the man walked toward her, standing near the table until Giovanni moved away. Then he spoke in English. “Hello, Buffy,” he said softly.

“Hey, Giles,” she responded. “Um… long time no see.”

“Indeed.” There was an awkward moment of silence and then she invited him to sit. Giovanni watched from behind the counter as the excitement drained from her face along with the color, to be replaced by a pale, ill sort of expression. Whatever was happening between them, he could tell, was not good.

She poured him a glass of wine, which he did not touch, and asked after his health quietly. He told her he’d been well. “Quite well,” he clarified. “And yourself?”

She shrugged. “Surviving. How’s everyone?”

“They’re all well,” he responded, seeming to hear the hollowness in his own echo as he spoke. “Xander’s marrying soon. Lovely girl from Brighton. Willow’s single again and enjoying her freedom quite a lot.”

Buffy nodded, tried to force a smile and failed. “The, um… Council project still going good?”

“Oh, yes, very well,” he responded, seeming to seize on the topic. “We’ve an academy begun for the new girls. It helps, especially with the younger ones. Things are going quite smoothly.”

“Good.” She nodded again, feeling absurdly like a bobblehead doll. She swallowed hard and then whispered, “I miss you. All of you. And… and especially you.”

He looked down at his untouched glass of wine. “It’s been… difficult, Buffy,” he said after a very long silence. “For all of us. But… I think things are best as they are. For now, at least.”

She swallowed hard, her eyes glistening in the candlelight, and looked down at her clasped hands. “Okay,” she whispered, almost inaudibly.

There was another very long silence and then he spoke again. “I really should go,” he said, not unkindly. “I’ve an early flight back to London tomorrow.”

She nodded. “I… I’m sorry, Giles,” she said finally, in a voice that trembled badly. “Please… tell them?”

“I will,” he assured her. Then he stood. “Take care, Buffy. I’ll call soon.”

“Okay.” She looked up long enough to watch him walk out of the bistro, and then her head bowed again. Giovanni could see the tears on her cheeks glittering in the flickering candlelight. He started to walk over to make sure that she was all right but was forestalled when a young man did the same thing. Giovanni’s brow furrowed for a moment, wondering where exactly the young man had come from, but then he forgot to wonder as the young man began to speak earnestly as he slid into the chair that the man had so recently vacated. “Ma belle,” he said to her in a Venetian accent, “Why do you weep?”

“Because they hate me. Because this stupid exile is never gonna end. They’re never going to forgive me. God, I hate this,” she sniffled in Italian.

“Surely they don’t hate you,” the man said smoothly. “They should only see that you are truly contrite, yes? Then they would welcome you back with open arms, forget the anger and remember only the love, no?”

She shook her head miserably. “It’s not that simple.”

“Ah, ma belle,” he said softly, reaching out to cover her hand with his. “What would you do, if you could, to repair this damage?”

“Anything,” she said sadly. “Why do you think I let them send me here?”

He leaned forward now, and something about him made Giovanni suddenly very nervous. “Ah, but ma belle, what if there were a way to change all this?” he asked with a sweep of his hand. “What if there were a way to return you to the bosom of your friends and loved ones, to perhaps go back before it all went so wrong and undo all of it?”

She gave a bitter half-laugh. “I could only wish.”

The man gave a low, throaty chuckle then, and Buffy looked up at him, then gasped in horror. “No!” she exclaimed. “No, don’t!”

Giovanni looked over at the man and gasped in horror. His face had gone terrifying – veiny and horrible. In a grating, evil voice the man intoned, “Wish granted.”

Giovanni reeled with a moment of vertigo and clutched at the counter. His son, who had just ducked in out of the bright Roman afternoon, hurried across the floor to him. “Papa, are you all right?”

“Yes, yes, Tonio, I’m fine.” He smiled at his son. “And you have an appointment with young Carmelita, do you not?”

Tonio grinned widely. “So I do, Papa. I just stopped in to say hello. I’ll be back tonight.” He hugged his father and stepped back out again. Giovanni went on cleaning in preparation for the coming evening’s business.

Halfway around the world, Buffy Summers woke up, disoriented and alone, in an eerily familiar place. She sat up and looked around at the room she was in. “What the hell…?”


	2. Not-So-Instant Replay

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” Buffy paced back and forth in her dorm room, eyeballing items that belonged to herself and to Willow, hands buried in her hair, trying very hard to think. She had rolled out of the bed and raced to the mirror, finding herself dressed in her yummy sushi pajamas but wearing the same body she’d had the day before – or whenever it was; the time difference was making her head spin. “Think, Summers, think,” she said. “What happened? Vengeance demon. Giovanni’s. Oh, my God. But what the hell kind of vengeance demon was that?”

It was the best question she could think of right now. The only two she’d ever had any contact with had been Anya – former patron saint of scorned women – and Halfrek, who had granted wishes to angry children. “That was more like a… a… second chance demon, or something,” she murmured to herself. “Except…” She moved to the mirror again, examining her twenty-seven-year-old face once more. She sighed. She’d never gained back the weight she’d lost after coming back from the dead – she’d never regained her appetite – and in consequence she was still far too thin. Those yummy sushi pajamas that used to fit her now hung off her body. Her hair was a mess – the bun she’d worn it in the previous night, or whatever it had been, was scraggly from having been slept on; besides the fact that her dark roots were about half grown-out. Her skin was too pale, and her eyes had dark circles under them. She pinched herself. It hurt. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “It’s real.”

Giles. She needed Giles. She nearly reeled at the thought that Giles was actually accessible, and then she raced for the closet. The first pair of pants she put on proved to her that she actually had grown since college – at least an inch – but she’d lost several inches around her waist. She finally dug a pair of denim shorts out of a drawer and cinched them tight with a belt. She pulled a tee shirt on over her head and then pushed her feet into the new tennis shoes by her bed, then grabbed her keys off the desk. “Well, here goes nothing.”

She had intended to run, but the moment she stepped out the front door of Stevenson Hall, she could do nothing but walk and gawk. The route to Giles’s flat was as familiar to her as the back of her own hand, but she couldn’t help it: she had to stare around her at all those things she’d never thought to see again. Just in case it really was a dream, she drank in the sight of Weatherly Park, Restfield Cemetery, the Espresso Pump, the storefront that would eventually become the Magic Box; she even spied a glimpse, as she turned onto Oakpark Street, of the burned-out shell of Sunnydale High School, up on the hill. Then she was passing his Citroen, which she paused to touch gently in remembrance, and then she was turning into the Spanish-tiled courtyard and walking up to the familiar green front door.

She took a deep breath and knocked on the door, then waited for him to answer. There was the sound of footsteps and then the doorknob turning – she felt her heart clench for the days when he had left his door unlocked for her. Then he was there, the Giles she remembered, the one who cared and who would never leave her no matter what. And he was staring at her in shock. “Buffy…?”

Her eyes welled up at the concern in his voice – concern which hadn’t truly been there since Sunnydale went down in a huge sinkhole and her friends exiled her to Rome. “Oh, God, Giles,” she whispered.

“Buffy, what on Earth has happened to you?” he asked her, stepping back to allow her entry. She slipped past him into the apartment and immediately began pacing.

“It’s a spell or something,” she said, trying to keep herself composed, “I think. Or maybe a vengeance demon. I’m not sure. I was in Giovanni’s, in Rome, and you had just left, and this guy came over and sat down, and you know, it’s weird, he kinda looked like Q. From Star Trek, not Bond. But anyway, he sat down, and he started talking to me… and he had an accent. Like… not like a Roman. Like maybe he was from Venice. Or maybe Florence. I’m not good with the accents. And he was talking to me, asking me if there was anything I could do to fix things, and I said I could only wish, and I know I’m not supposed to make wishes to strange people, but I didn’t think that counted, honest I didn’t!”

Giles was staring at her. Her dramatically-altered appearance had thrown him for such a loop that he could only seize on the one thing in her whole babble that he could rebut. “Buffy, you don’t speak Italian.”

“Yes, I do,” she replied in Italian. “Fluently. Giles, that’s not the point.”

“Your accent is appalling,” he replied, also in Italian, reaching for his glasses and polishing them briskly. “I’ll make tea,” he added, switching back to English.

“You do that,” she replied wryly.

When the tea was made, they sat on the sofa together sipping it. Giles couldn’t take his eyes off Buffy’s changed appearance. He began quizzing her on her life as an excuse to continue studying her. Her hair was growing out, he saw, and he wondered why.

“Well, I’ve been in Rome for four years,” she told him. “After we closed the Hellmouth, I kind of… retired.”

“We?” he inquired, his eyes carefully taking in her thinner form. He imagined that if her shirt were off, he would be able to count her ribs easily.

She nodded. “Me, you, Xander, Willow, Faith, Sp… uh, some other people. Potential Slayers.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Potentials? Really? A concentrated gathering?”

She nodded. “The First Evil was attacking. Remember the Harbingers from last Christmas? They were finding and killing all the Watchers and Potentials. So I found this scythe and Angel brought this amulet, and Willow did a spell that made all the Potentials become Slayers.”

He gawked. “Willow?”

She nodded. “And that’s after trying to end the world just the year before. She made a lot of progress.”

He sipped his tea for a long moment, considering this as well as the haunting, hunted look in her eyes that was poorly masked by the veil of humor she tried to cover with. “Well,” he said lightly, “I imagine we’ll need to research.”

“Yeah, I wanna find out what that thing was,” Buffy agreed. “I mean, that wasn’t your average vengeance demon.”

“Well, yes, of course,” he replied, “as well as to find out how to reverse what was done and send you home.” He was astonished when her hands began suddenly to shake so badly that she had to put her cup down before she spilled it. “Are you quite all right?” he asked her, even though it was fairly obvious that she wasn’t. Her face had gone the color of spoiled milk and she was shaking her head rapidly.

“No. No. I won’t go back. I won’t go. Giles, please don’t make me go. Please don’t make me go back there.” Her voice was pleading, almost desperate.

As he watched her in shock, tears began to fall down her face and she seemed almost to fold in on herself. It suddenly occurred to Giles that she was broken. Something, likely a series of things, had happened to her which had been so traumatic as to break Buffy’s formidable spirit. Not really knowing what else to do, he pulled her awkwardly into his arms, soothing her with soft words as best he could. “There, there, Buffy, it’s all right. Everything will be all right.”

“No, it’s not,” she sobbed. “It’s wrong, it all went wrong when Mom died and it just kept getting wronger the longer it went on.”

“What happened, Buffy?” he asked softly, trying not to react to the shocking news of Joyce’s impending death.

“Mom died,” she repeated. “Mom died, and then I died. But they couldn’t let me go and they brought me back. I was in Heaven and they brought me back and that’s when everything started to go really bad.”

“They brought you back?” Giles asked incredulously. “Who?”

“Will and Xand and Tara and Anya,” she replied, sniffling but trying to get herself under control. “They did a spell with an Urn of Osiris and they brought me back. And I had the joy of digging myself out of my own grave. And then you came back, but you said I wasn’t taking care of D… of things, so you left. And you didn’t come back until Willow needed you.”

He didn’t have to be a genius to hear the bitterness in her voice, or to see that she was keeping things from him. But he had to trust her; she was his Slayer. If she was hiding things, there was a good reason for it. “What else happened?” he asked gently.

Buffy took a deep breath. “You took Willow away to Devon, to the coven there. Then she came back, but you didn’t. Then you did, but you brought the Wannaslay Brigade with you. And we just… couldn’t connect. You kept telling me to be a leader, but then you didn’t approve of any of my decisions and you made sure that I and everybody else in the house knew it. And girls kept dying. And then it was over and Sunnydale was gone and you and Willow and Xander were going to London. Faith went off to the Cleveland Hellmouth. And… and… I wanted to go with you, and you wouldn’t let me.”

Her voice had gotten so small that Giles could barely hear her. “I wouldn’t let you? Why?” He was stunned. Not allow his bonded Slayer to come with him wherever he went? Abandon her when she was directly out of the grave? Had he been possessed by something?

She bowed her head in shame. “It was my fault all those girls died and it was… best for all concerned for me to be in a neutral place, away from the day to day problems and bustle of running a Council that I undoubtedly had no interest in being a part of, what with the last seven years I spent fighting so hard against my destiny. So you bought me a little townhouse with Council money and you sent me a check every month and you called once a week to make sure I was still alive.”

He must have been possessed by something, Giles decided. There was no other explanation for it. He desperately wanted to find his future self and strangle the man for inflicting this kind of pain on Buffy. He reached out and took her hand. “You’re here, now, Buffy,” he said softly. “With me. We’ll work it out somehow.”

She looked up at him then, and he saw the faith in him shining in her eyes, faith that somehow, through it all, she had never quite lost. “You promise?”

He nodded. “I promise.”


	3. Laws of Physics

Buffy rolled over, blinking at the brilliant sunlight, and lifted her head, confused. Her room wasn’t anywhere near this bright, even in the middle of the day, and this sunlight had the look of morning to it. She looked around in confusion and gaped at the bedroom she was currently occupying. It was huge. The bed itself was king sized; massive, soft and warm. The bedding and linen was all white, which contrasted beautifully with the natural wood of the frame and the rest of the furniture in the room: desk, dresser and chairs. The walls were a deep tan stucco, the floor gray marble shot with blue veins and covered with white throw rugs. A set of French doors stood open nearby, white gauze curtains billowing in a warm breeze and affording tantalizing glimpses of a stone balcony and brilliant blue sky. “It’s like something out of an Angelina Jolie movie,” Buffy mumbled to herself, dragging herself out of bed and padding barefoot over to the doors. She hesitated before walking out onto the balcony, dressed as she was in only an oversized man’s work shirt, but then she shrugged. It hung down to her knees, so she was decently covered; besides, whoever had brought her here had obviously dressed her and had therefore already gotten a peek. What did it matter? She walked out onto the balcony and stared.

“Rome?” she whimpered, unaware that she was speaking out loud. “How did I get to Rome?” She stood there for a long time, perhaps fifteen minutes, simply staring at the spectacular view of the Colosseum, then swallowed hard. “Giles. Giles. I need Giles.” She spun and went back into the room, looking around carefully for anything that could be used as a weapon. She found something better: a cellular telephone. She snatched it up and began to dial with shaking fingers, then listened to the clicks of the international connection. Her heart leapt as the phone rang once, then twice, and then connected, only to freeze in terror at the sound of a woman’s recorded voice. “The number you have dialed is not a working number. Please hang up and try your call again.”

She hung up the phone in numb shock, checked on the screen to verify that she’d dialed correctly, and then dialed again in a daze, this time trying her mother’s number, then the dorm room she shared with Willow, and finally Xander’s basement. At all three places she received the same recording. She was shaking hard when she placed the telephone back down on the desk and tried the nearby door. It opened into a spacious bathroom decorated in Mediterranean blues and ocean greens. Another door on the other side of the bathroom opened into a closet full of women’s clothing, almost all of which was three or four sizes too small for her. She searched through the clothing until she found a pair of jeans she could fit into, then took a deep breath and tried the main door of the bedroom.

To her surprise, it opened easily and the long hallway outside was empty. She looked back and forth, then decided to brave the downstairs. She padded down the hall and silently crept down the teakwood staircase. At the foot of the stairs, hanging on the wall, was a display of knives, obviously decorative. Buffy took a small one and slid it into her waistband at the small of her back, then palmed a larger one, brandishing it openly. There was a sound of pots banging in what was probably the kitchen, so she moved toward the sound.

There was a young woman in the kitchen, about twenty-one years old, with bobbed brown hair and a willowy figure. She was hanging copper pots on a rack over a stove with her back to Buffy. The Slayer firmed up her grip on the knife, swallowed hard, and cleared her throat. “Who are you and why am I here?” she asked loudly.

The girl jumped and screamed. Several pots went clanging to the floor. “Damn it, Buffy,” the girl shouted, dropping to her knees without looking at Buffy and beginning to gather up the pots. “Don’t freaking scare me like that! It’s not funny! I thought you were still upstairs sleeping off last night!”

Buffy was taken aback. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You, stumbling in piss drunk as usual, only more so, after you saw Giles,” the girl replied acidly, standing up to hang the pots back up, still with her back to Buffy.

The Slayer reeled slightly. “Giles? Giles brought me here?” She flashed back in her mind instantly to her eighteenth birthday, her heart breaking at the idea that this could possibly be another Council-mandated test of some sort that she was going to be subjected to against her will. It was suddenly very hard to breathe.

“You idiot, you brought yourself here,” the girl snapped, hanging the last pot. “Giles went back to England… last… night…” her voice trailed off as she turned around and took in Buffy’s appearance, her face displaying open and blatant shock. “Oh, my God, Buffy! What did you do?”

Buffy gaped at her. “What did I do? What do you mean, what did I do? You kidnapped me and brought me here, and now you’re telling me my Watcher is involved, and you’re asking me what did _I_ do?!”

“You’re such a liar, Buffy! You did a spell or something, didn’t you? You know Giles will find out. Or Willow will. She’ll smell the magic on you.”

Buffy’s world tilted slightly farther on its axis. “Willow’s involved in this, too?” she almost whimpered in disbelief. Then she brandished her knife as the dark-haired girl approached her. “Don’t come any closer. I don’t know you but I swear to God, I’ll hurt you.”

“Buffy, stop it!” the girl shouted. “You’re acting like you’ve lost what little mind you have left! I swear to God, I’m gonna get them to lock you up!”

“ _Who are you?!”_ Buffy almost screamed.

The girl stared at her, suddenly seeming to realize that she wasn’t acting. “I’m Dawn,” she said softly. “I’m… your little sister.”

Within five minutes, Dawn was able to reach Giles on his cellular telephone. “I’m so glad Willow makes you carry that thing,” she told him when he answered. “How soon can you be back in Rome?”

“I haven’t left,” he replied. “My flight was overbooked and not even the considerable leaning power of the Council could get me a seat.”

“Oh, thank God. I need you here now.”

“What’s wrong, Dawn?”

“You’ll never believe me,” the girl replied. “Just get here.”

Buffy felt like some kind of strange animal on display as Giles and the girl called Dawn stared at her across the huge living room and consulted in whispers. She had been curled up on one end of the couch, her knees drawn up tightly to her chest, when he came in, looking older and angrier and not like her Giles at all. He wasn’t the trusted Watcher she had tried to call for help from upstairs. No, this man who looked at her like a particularly distasteful specimen under a microscope was a stranger who simply wore Giles’s face.

When he walked in the door and set his bag and overcoat down in the floor, her first instinct had been to come off the couch and fly to him, seeking comfort in his presence and begging him to make everything better. Then he had looked up at her, effectively arresting her forward motion, pinning her to the couch with his stare much like a butterfly is pinned by a collector to a card. She’d curled back in on herself almost instantly, feeling the cold hand of fear clutch at the pit of her stomach. Who was this man?

“What have you done, Buffy?” he demanded in iron tones, and for the first time in several months, she suddenly found herself wanting to cry.

“I didn’t do anything!” she defended herself. “I patrolled last night and then I came in and went to bed and when I woke up this morning I was here! I swear, Giles, I didn’t do anything!”

“Yes, well, that remains to be seen.” He dug into his overcoat pocket, pulled out a bag of powder, reached into it, and cast a handful at her, shouting a sentence in what might have been Greek.

She sneezed.

He stared at her. Then he looked at Dawn. “That should have reversed whatever spell she did,” he said, sounding dumbfounded.

“I _told_ you I didn’t _do_ a spell!” Buffy shouted. “Why can’t you believe me?”

Giles just looked at her for a long time. “Buffy… things have changed.”

“Yeah, that’s a big DUH,” she snapped. “I guess things have changed big time, if I’m here in Rome in this huge house with some girl I don’t even know and you’re far away in London and you… you come in here like… like… like me needing help is some kind of… inconvenience to you.” She swallowed hard on these last words, feeling once again the sucker-punch she’d received just a few weeks previously when she had been just such an inconvenience to him.

He apparently saw it in her eyes. Whatever else might have changed, he still retained his ability to read her mind when he needed to. He stepped toward her. “Buffy, no, it’s not like that. It’s just – ”

“Then tell me what it’s _like_ ,” she spat, the tears which had been threatening all morning finally breaking through the dam and spilling down her face. “Tell me what it’s like for you in England with the life you always wanted that you couldn’t ever have because of me! Tell me what it’s like that you hate me so much that you left me here and you didn’t even believe me when I told you I didn’t do a spell, and you _know_ Hellmouthy stuff happens to me! Sure, Giles! Tell me what it’s _like_!” Pushing past him then, she ran upstairs to the room she’d awakened in, slamming the door shut behind her and throwing herself on the bed to sob out her fear and confusion alone.


	4. Old Habits Die Hard

She felt a little like a zoo exhibit when Willow and Xander arrived at Giles’s apartment in response to his summoning phone calls. They stared at her in shock and amazement, and though her first reaction was to apologize for herself and defer to them as she had trained herself to do over the past four years, a strange thing began to happen to her the longer she spent with them. As she remembered what things had been like for them before her death in Glory’s portal, she began to compare things in her mind to how life had been for her after she was brought back.

Willow’s face still carried a certain eager innocence, and of the faintly egotistical expression she had worn after successfully resurrecting Buffy, there was no sign. She came into the apartment speaking excitedly to Xander of Tara, but her words froze in her mouth and her eyes grew round as saucers when she spied Buffy. Xander, on the other hand, nearly broke Buffy’s heart when he turned two huge brown puppy-dog eyes on her. She had to swallow hard to keep from crying when he approached her warily, studying her carefully. “Hey, Buff,” he finally said softly. “Look at you. You got all grown up.”

She fought the tears that wanted to fall at the easy affection in his voice. How she had missed them! Their friendship hadn’t really been healthy since her return from the grave. They had spent so many months tiptoeing around that topic, and then there had been her “relationship” with Spike and its accompanying shame and guilt, followed almost immediately by Tara’s death, Willow’s deadly grief and the summer of pain. Then, of course, on the heels of that had come the autumn of fear followed by the winter and spring of the First Evil, their destructive last few months in Sunnydale, and then the final apocalypse – both the Hellmouth and the apocalypse which had occurred in her life. When it had all been over, then had come the final blow which had shattered her world. She had missed them all so much.

Giles had warned them when he called that Buffy was in a fragile state, but they were not expecting her to go to pieces at the sight of them. On instinct, Willow moved to hug Buffy. The Slayer did cry then, wrapping her arms around her friend and holding on as tightly as she dared.

“Hey, hey, I want some, too,” Xander protested, and both girls extended an arm, allowing him access to their hug.

Buffy looked at Giles over Willow’s shoulder and extended a hand to him. She gave him a watery attempt at a smile, and he returned it, taking her hand but declining to join the group embrace, though he was grateful that she had still been able to reach out to him. He wasn’t sure what his future self had done to her or why, but he vowed to do his level best to repair the damage and make her whole again. And if, by some twist of the space-time continuum, he should ever meet his future self face-to-face, he swore to soundly kick the bastard’s arse.

If Willow or Xander noticed Buffy’s almost desperate need to be close to Giles or her tendency to reach out and touch him while speaking to him – almost as if she were trying to reassure herself that he was really there – neither of them mentioned it. They simply behaved as though it were normal behavior for her and moved on. They were sitting around and discussing the possibility that Buffy’s mystery Venetian was actually a vengeance demon when there was a knock on the door.

  
Giles raised an eyebrow at Willow and Xander. “Were either of you expecting someone to meet you here?” he asked them. When they both shook their heads, he stood and went to the door. Buffy’s eyes followed him across the room and then widened as he pulled the door open, revealing the visitor on the stoop.

“Hi, Mr. Giles,” Riley Finn said. “I was wondering if Buffy was here. We were supposed to get together today but I haven’t seen her and she isn’t in her dorm room.”

Buffy froze in place on the couch. She’d forgotten all about Riley. She hadn’t seen or heard from him since he and his oh-so-perfect GI Barbie wife had vanished in their government helicopter going back to South America to chase demons. Then Riley’s eyes flicked past Giles and landed on her face as Giles shifted in the doorway. She waited for the old, familiar thump-thud in her heart, but it didn’t come, and she was briefly puzzled. Then she forgot to be puzzled when he crossed the room in a few quick strides and knelt in front of her. “Buffy, what happened to you?” he asked softly, concern in his voice and on his face.

Buffy looked up at Giles, who shrugged slightly, as if to say that she should tell him whatever she felt comfortable telling him. Buffy pondered the implications for a moment, knowing well that anything she said would go straight back to Maggie Walsh, and sighed. “I’m not really sure,” she finally lied.

“You’re not sure?” His expression turned confused and his hands slid up to her upper arms, gripping her slightly just above her elbows. “Buffy, how can you not be sure? I mean, what did you do?”

Alarm bells went off in Buffy’s mind as Riley’s hands tightened on her arms with his question. She pulled back slightly. “Let go of me. I didn’t do anything.”

“Buffy, c’mon, it’s me. You need to just tell me what happened, and we’ll go talk to Professor Walsh and we’ll fix it and put you back like you were.”

Even without the mention of Professor Walsh, Giles could have told Riley – had he been so inclined – that those were the wrong words to say to this Buffy. She immediately began to struggle away from him, though she was hampered by the fact that she’d backed herself into the corner of the couch. “No! Let me go! Get off me!”

Misunderstanding her reaction, Riley tried to hold onto Buffy to calm her down, his hands tightening on her arms even more. “Buffy, stop it! Relax, Buffy! Stop fighting me!”

Buffy’s overstressed mind overlaid a working-class English accent over the words, superimposed another face over Riley’s, and her eyes suddenly went wild as she went directly into panic mode. She threw Riley off her, sending him flying across the room, then rolled off the couch and ran straight out the open front door past Giles, pelting down the street. The entire exchange took less than four minutes, as Giles, Willow and Xander watched in shock.

“What the hell just happened?” Riley asked Xander, who was helping him up off the floor. “She acted like she was crazy.”

Willow, however, was looking at Giles in horror. “She acted like an assault survivor,” the redhead contradicted Riley in a soft voice.

“What?” Xander exclaimed.

Giles raised an eyebrow at Willow. “Is that the impression you got?” he asked in a carefully neutral tone.

Willow nodded, looking miserable, as Riley paled slightly. “She… she reacted like a woman who’s survived a rape,” the witch said, trying to sound clinical. “Like what you said gave her a flashback.”

The more Giles considered it, the more plausible it sounded. Especially if she had employed the famous It-Never-Happened method of dealing with her trauma. “Bloody hell,” he sighed. “Now where are we going to find her?”

“I’ll go look – ” Riley began, but Giles cut him off.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort. You’ve caused quite enough trouble for today, thank you. Go home.”

It suddenly occurred to the young soldier that, while Mr. Giles tolerated his presence with a certain amount of equanimity for Buffy’s sake, the Englishman did not particularly care for Riley. He swallowed. “Yes, sir.” And then he was gone, presumably heading back to campus.

The other three decided to split up. Willow would search the end of town back toward campus and the campus itself; Xander would search the center of town and Buffy’s favorite patrolling spots; Giles would search the end of town back toward Revello Drive and Buffy’s home. They parted on their mission.

It was Giles who found her. He was coming down the sidewalk toward the house at 1630 Revello Drive when Joyce’s Jeep passed him heading for her house. She didn’t notice him and pulled to a stop at the curb. Giles looked toward the house and saw Buffy, sitting on the front steps, huddled into herself. She didn’t even have a key to get into the house.

Joyce climbed out of the Jeep and turned toward the house, then spotted Buffy, whose head was down on her knees. Giles heard her say, “Buffy? Honey, how come you didn’t go inside?”

Then Buffy looked up. Joyce gasped at Buffy’s changed face and form, and Giles saw the shock and disbelief on Buffy’s own face. He suddenly realized that it had somehow never occurred to her that her mother was still alive now.

Joyce was speaking, but Buffy wasn’t hearing the words. She only knew the sound of her mother’s voice, a sound she had not heard in seven years, and the sight of her mother’s beloved face. She stood and took a couple of steps forward in a haze of disbelief, not quite able to grasp the fact that her mother was really there, truly standing before her, alive and healthy – Joyce who, no matter what happened, had never, ever stopped loving Buffy. Then, with a small cry, Buffy threw herself into her mother’s arms.


	5. You Don't Know Jack

She had decided to take a shower, and much later she would decide that it was that decision which possibly changed the outcome of the whole huge mess. She felt filthy somehow, and so she went into the huge bathroom to remedy that. One long, hot shower later, smelling of vanilla and tropical flowers, she wrapped herself in a fluffy towel and went into the closet, hoping to find some clothing that she’d be able to fit into. She wondered if anyone had noticed that her future self had apparently taken a hiatus from eating.

She eventually located some jeans of larger sizes tucked away in a drawer and pulled one out, sighing gratefully, only to be surprised when three spiral notebooks fell out of the unfolding garment. “What?”

Buffy knelt, picking up the battered notebooks, and examined them. Each of them had a set of dates written on the cover and she easily recognized her own handwriting. 04/05/05-07/28/05; 07/30/05-09/12/05; 09/15/05-12/01/05. She flipped open the cover of one of them and discovered that at some point in the future she must have taken up journaling, because here before her lay an incredibly detailed diary of her own future life. But why was only this brief time span represented?

She looked at the open drawer. It was the bottom drawer in this shelf, and it was full of clothes that were obviously never worn. She began to dig through it. Then she began digging through the rest of the drawers and seeking between hanging items as well. Before long, she had assembled an entire set of journals dating from July first of 2004 all the way up through April twenty-ninth of 2007. She hurriedly dressed and then carried the notebooks into the bedroom, laying them on the bed and then looking around. “Where would it be?”

Her future self had obviously gone to a great deal of trouble to hide those journals. She would not leave the one she was currently working on out where the girl called Dawn could easily find it. Buffy lifted the mattress and checked under it, then checked all the drawers in the desk and the dresser. None of these places yielded a spiral-bound notebook. She looked around carefully, examining everything she saw with the eyes of a Slayer. Then her eye fell on the huge framed mirror which hung on the wall directly across from the French doors. It would be far too heavy for the girl Dawn to move.

First taking the precaution to lock the door to the hallway, Buffy moved across the room and lifted the mirror from the wall. Sure enough, there was a tack in the back of the frame and a notebook dangled from that tack by the spiral. Buffy took that notebook down as well and replaced the mirror, then moved to the bed and put the newest notebook on the bottom of the pile. Then she picked up the first notebook and opened it, beginning to read.

_July 1, 2004_

_Salvator Mundi International Hospital_

_Psych Ward_

_I don’t know why they brought me here. It’s not like they want me around. I kinda figured I’d be doing them a favor if I just checked out. But they still can’t let me die. First they drag me out of Heaven and now they drag me to the psych ward. Figures. Not the first time. Mom and Dad stuck me in a psych ward before. Before Sunnydale. Before everything. They thought I was nuts. I am nuts. That’s why they don’t want me around. Why would they? They don’t want to be around psycho Buffy._

_Poor psycho Buffy. We should have left her dead because she hasn’t been right in her head since we dragged her out of Heaven and made her dig her way out of her own grave. I just don’t understand why she wasn’t more grateful. Sure she thought she was done, but who cares what she thought or what she wanted, right?_

_Right._

_The doctor wants me to keep this journal. She promised that I don’t have to show it to anyone so I guess it’s okay to talk about Slayer stuff in it. Not that it matters. If they make me show it and they see the Slayer stuff they’ll just keep me locked up here longer. But they’re gonna keep me here as long as I keep telling them that I want to be dead, anyway, and that’s not gonna change any time soon, no matter how many drugs they give me._

Buffy stared at the page, unable to believe the depth of despair pouring off the stark page. Then she thought about the man downstairs masquerading as Giles and thought that maybe she could believe it, too. She flipped the page, continuing to read entry upon entry in her own writing about how she had died to save the life of a younger sister she never had, and how her so-called friends had dragged her back from the dead, and the way they had behaved toward her afterward. She could see a small change, a trend toward lighter words and tones as therapy and medication helped the writer of the words somewhat, but there was still a depth of agony there which was not to be believed.

_August 14, 2004_

_Salvator Mundi International Hospital_

_Psych Ward_

_Giles came to visit me today. He said he’d been really busy with Council stuff. I tried not to be angry. I would have been angry before, but I tried not to be angry because when I get angry it makes me want to hurt myself again. Dr. Marcelo said I did really well during his visit. It was really good to see him, even though he could only stay for half an hour. He told me that the girls in London are doing really well and everything seems to be running smoothly. I asked him when he thought I would be able to come there, and he said maybe when I was better. But he didn’t look at me when he said it._

_A new girl was admitted today named Francisca. She’s very nice. Her eyes, though, are totally blank…_

The entries continued, detailing the writer’s daily life in the psych ward of the Italian hospital. Most of the entries were fairly short, as life on the ward tended to be day-in-and-day-out, but on the very infrequent occasions when someone came to visit her, she might go on for pages about a half-hour visit. She was in the hospital for a little over three months, and Giles only came to see her once. By the time Buffy finished reading that first notebook, she was feeling the slowly-stirring embers of anger start to stoke up into a fire of rage.

The words of the journal entries Buffy read detailed a fairly pleasant, if slightly boring, life for the retired Slayer. The alleged sister went to John Cabot University, had friends, a boyfriend; the Slayer mostly sat around the house and wished that someone would remember that she was alive. The words of the journal entries described an idyllic life of leisure. But Buffy, adept at reading between her own lines, could hear the despair in her own words which no amount of therapy or medication could eradicate. The references to Giles, who had a knack for calling when Buffy was out and who never seemed to be at home when Buffy called; to Willow, who still occasionally took Buffy’s calls but with a seeming attitude that Buffy should be grateful for the favor of her continued friendship; to Xander, who called the house to talk only to Dawn; all these things added up in Buffy’s mind. The smaller size of the clothes in her closet made sense when she read an entry that mentioned Buffy’s lack of appetite or desire to eat.

_December 29, 2004_

_My room_

_The house in Rome_

_Dawn is supposed to come home today. She says she went to Spain with her friend Maria from school, but… but when she called yesterday to ask if I had eaten, I think I heard Giles talking in the background._

_I didn’t say anything… but after she hung up I went in the basement for a long time and screamed._

_I didn’t cut myself. I was actually kind of proud of myself for that. I didn’t cut myself. I have to hold onto that. I’m getting better. I’m not as bad as they say I am. I’m not._

Buffy found herself with tears running down her face. She had spent Christmas alone in this strange city while the sister-that-wasn’t went to England and spend Christmas with her Watcher? How was that right?

She continued to read, and the longer she read, the more of a pattern she saw emerging in her future life – a life that she was increasingly determined not to lead. She had died. That much was obvious. Then she had been brought back. At some point between that time and the apocalypse which had destroyed Sunnydale, she and her friends and her Watcher had somehow all become estranged. Her friends declared that it was all her fault; she herself, however, felt that she at least had some right to feel the way she had felt. Had they not done her a huge disservice and then somehow expected her to be grateful? Certainly it seemed that she may have made mistakes, but Buffy felt that by the time these events occurred, these people ought to have known her well enough to know that Buffy Summers was going to make mistakes in her life.

After the final apocalypse, her “friends” had apparently gathered together in secret and held tribunals together and pronounced her guilty of indefinable war crimes. Declaring themselves judge, jury and executioner, they had sentenced her to live out her life in exile in this beautifully appointed prison in Rome, not even permitted to fulfill her sacred duty any more – for here was an entry in which Dawn caught Buffy leaving for patrol and told her in no uncertain terms that Buffy, who had been the Slayer since the age of fifteen, was no longer _allowed_ to patrol. They had taken away her life and left her with a shell of herself. She, no surprise, had sunk into despair and apparently attempted to end her existence.

But she was not even allowed that escape. Dawn summoned paramedics and had Buffy committed, therapied and medicated. Buffy was treated for depression, anxiety, an eating disorder, and some other mild issues, and released with medication and a biweekly therapist appointment which did her no good, for she could not discuss her true issues with someone who knew nothing of the demon world. Someone named Andrew apparently popped up in Rome from time to time, “checking in” and, Buffy suspected, carrying reports back to Giles about Buffy’s behavior. Giles himself popped in about once every six months, said a few words to Buffy and behaved toward her as a chastising parent, and then vanished again. The entries reflected a growing desperation to please him, to do whatever was necessary to end her pain.

“She’s brainwashing herself,” Buffy whispered to herself. “Oh, my God. She’s brainwashing herself and they know it and they’re letting her do it.”

By the time she reached the most recent journal, Buffy was furious at her friends for treating her this way, no matter what mistakes she had made, and at herself for allowing it. If they hated her so badly, then why didn’t they sever ties with her and move on? And why on Earth was she allowing them to chain her like this? The newest journal had only one entry in it, but it was telling.

_April 29, 2007_

_My Room_

_The House in Rome_

_Giles is coming._

_He’s coming for Dawn, of course, he always does. But he promised to spend some time with me while he’s here. I asked him specially and he said he would._

_I’ve been really good. I’ve been taking my medicine and I’ve gone to my doctor’s appointments and I’ve even eaten every day this week._

_I’m gonna ask him. I haven’t asked him in a long time. I’m gonna ask him if I can come home with him. I miss him. I miss him so much, and Xander and Willow, but mostly I miss him. Dawn’s graduating. We could leave now. We could go to England and start over and everything_ _could_ _be happy now. And I’d be good. I know I would._

_Maybe I could tell him I love him. Maybe he would let me._

Buffy closed the final notebook softly. So old habits died hard. He had saved her life once, and had become a god in her eyes, and that had never changed, no matter how much they had gone through. Not even the betrayal of her eighteenth birthday could change that for her; how could something like this? Didn’t all the songs say true love never died?

Buffy lay down on the bed, looking at the stack of notebooks through tear-filled eyes. What the hell was she going to do now? She was trapped here in this place with this Giles who was older and angrier and she was even younger now than she had been before, and even a complete personality overhaul had apparently not been enough for him. What was she going to do?

A knocking at the door sometime later woke her from a light doze; she had fallen asleep trying to think of a course of action. Giles spoke from the hallway. “Buffy, may I come in?”

She sat up and straightened her hair quickly. “Yeah,” she said softly, and he entered.

His eyes went immediately to the stack of notebooks. “What are those?”

“My journals,” she replied, placing a proprietary hand on the top one when he would have reached for it. “I’d rather you didn’t,” she said softly. “They’re kinda… private.”

He subsided for the moment. “I’d like you to come downstairs,” he said. “We need to talk.”

“Yeah, we do,” she agreed. “But you need to not throw any more dusty stuff on me. I get enough of that on patrols; I don’t need it when I’m sitting on a couch not staking things.”

He sighed. “Just come downstairs, Buffy, and don’t be difficult.”

Her eyes widened, and then suddenly narrowed. “Or what?” she snapped. “You’ll go back to England and leave me here all by myself with some girl I don’t know who isn’t my sister? It seems to be your preferred method for dealing with me when I do something you don’t like.” She made a slight gesture toward the notebooks.

He looked slightly taken aback. “I beg your pardon?”

“Yeah, well, you should,” she responded flatly. “You know something, Giles? Before I read these diaries, I had no idea that you could ever be a complete asshole to me. I found out how wrong I was today. I don’t know what you think I did to you, but whatever it is, I’ve got a clue for you: get over it. Either that, or get lost. But whatever you do, stop stringing her – me – along the way you have been. If you’re never gonna forgive her for whatever it is, then fine. But at least have the decency to tell her.”

His eyes narrowed in return. “You have no conception of what’s gone on,” he began.

She cut him off. “You’re right,” she said, “I don’t. Unless you count the fact that I happen to know that she got brought back from the dead and you walked out on her when she needed you. Jesus Christ, Giles! She came back from the _dead_ , and you left her because she was _leaning_ on you too hard? You’re my Watcher, Giles! I’m _supposed_ to come to you for help and support! Isn’t that what you spent three years in high school training me to do?”

“Yes, and you were determined to assert your independence,” he snapped back.

“I’m eighteen, Giles! Of course I was! But just because I’m trying to be independent doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally need some help! And I would think that if I was just back from the dead, and especially having been dragged out of Heaven and had to dig myself out of my own grave, I _might_ need just a _little_ help and support from the one person I trust more than anyone else in the world!”

She clamped her lips shut then, having revealed more than she intended. She glared at him. “Let me just make one thing clear,” she said acidly. “Things are about to change around here.”


	6. The Healing Process

“I’m worried about her, Giles. I really am. Have you noticed how she kind of cringes whenever she thinks you’re gonna say something, like, bad or whatever?” Xander’s expression was earnest and deeply concerned. He was sitting on Giles’s coffee table, looking across the flat at the Watcher, who stood in the kitchen setting up the tea things. “What’s happened to her, Giles?”

Giles sighed. “Quite a lot, Xander,” he said softly. “When Willow gets here, I’ll go into it. I’d rather not have to do this twice.”

“Are you sure she’s not gonna show up while you’re doing this?”

“Fairly,” he responded. “She’s supposed to be spending today with her mother.”

Xander nodded. “Good.”

Just then, the front door of the flat opened and Willow walked in, pushing it shut behind her. “Hey, Xander. Hey, Giles.”

“Hello, Willow. Tea?” Giles greeted her from the kitchen.

“Sure, thanks,” she replied, moving around to sit on the sofa, facing Xander.

“Hey, Will,” Xander said softly with a slight smile. “How’s college girl?”

“Not bad,” Willow replied, smiling nervously as Giles brought the tea things. “So what’s up? Where’s Buffy? We can’t have a Scooby meeting without Buffy.”

“Actually, we can,” Giles contradicted gently. “I’m very concerned about Buffy. Xander has expressed similar concern and so, to a lesser degree, has Joyce. Having her here, this changed… version, if you will, over the last two weeks, has been very educational, both in terms of prophecies and in light of certain personal behaviors.” Giles paused, seeking words.

“What the Word-Guy means, Will, is that we’re worried about the Buffster. She acts like a kicked puppy most of the time, and we need to figure out how to fix that.”

Willow nodded. “I’ve noticed that, too. She’s like a little kid who’s afraid of getting yelled at or getting a spanking.”

Giles nodded as well. “I have noticed in the past that the, er… spankings… which tend to affect Buffy the most tend to be emotional in nature,” he commented. “And Buffy does seem to have been… deeply affected.”

“But how do we fix it?” Willow asked, delving in her Willowy way straight to the heart of the matter.

“By showing her, in every way we can, that we care about her, and that we have no intention of harming her or of treating her in the shabby way she has been treated in the past,” Giles said firmly “I believe that the best cures for her ailments are simply love, patience, kindness and time. Given enough of each, I believe we can help, possibly even heal her.”

Willow and Xander both nodded. “We’ll do what we can, Giles,” Xander promised. “You know that.”

“She broke up with Riley,” Willow said suddenly.

“What?” Giles and Xander asked in unison.

Willow nodded. “He came by the dorm and he was pressuring her about going to Professor Walsh again,” she explained. The men grimaced, knowing what Buffy had told them about the Initiative, Adam and 314.

“What happened, Willow?” Giles asked.

“Well, he was pushing her about it when I came in from class,” Willow explained. “He was talking really low, like he thought I wouldn’t notice that she was backed up into the headboard of her bed and shaking like a leaf. So I told him to back off of her, and he told me to mind my own business. So I told him that Buffy _was_ my business and maybe he ought to try minding his.” Willow beamed with pride.

Xander grinned. “Way to go, Will! What happened then?”

“He grabbed Buffy’s hand and started pulling on her to try and make her go with him, and it was like she just snapped or something. She hauled off with the other hand and slugged him.”

“Good show!” Giles exclaimed, then blushed slightly at his outburst.

Willow grinned at him. “That’s pretty much what I said. Then she told him to get out and not come back.”

“When did this happen, Will?” Xander asked.

“This morning, before she left to go see her mom,” Willow responded.

“Very good. You see? She’s beginning to recover already.” Giles nodded firmly. “There’s very little doubt in my mind that this will work out just fine. We just need to be patient with her and reassure her that we will not bring her harm. Whatever mistakes we made, or rather, our counterparts made, in her timeline, we shall be on our guard not to repeat them here.” He looked into his teacup contemplatively. “She’s far too important to be treated in such a manner,” he added very softly.

Willow and Xander made eye contact, exchanging raised eyebrows at this final comment. Willow started to say something else, but paused when there was a knock at the door. The three of them turned toward it and Giles was rising when it opened. Buffy’s voice floated in. “Giles? Are… are you home?”

“Of course, Buffy,” he said, with a swift glance at the other two.

Buffy pushed the door open farther and started to step into the room, then froze at the sight of Willow and Xander sitting there. Her eyes grew wide as she took in the scene, and naked pain crossed her face. “That didn’t take long,” she said bitterly, backing out of the doorway.

Giles was after her in a moment. “What are you talking about, Buffy? What didn’t take long? We didn’t intend to exclude you; I had expected you to be with your mother today.” That wasn’t entirely true, but it was calculated to soothe.

Unfortunately, it failed. “Sure, Giles,” she said, her face crumpling. “That’s what you said before, too, only I was supposed to be with Dawn then. You guys didn’t expect Dawn to ditch me for the Wannaslay Brigade and me to overhear you talking about how much you hated me. That’s cool. I’ll just go. I don’t wanna be in the way.”

She turned away from him, starting for the street, but not before he saw the tears begin to fall from her eyes. Something snapped inside him at the sight of those tears and he decided he would be damned if she was leaving without a fight. By God, if he had to, he’d bring her back from the edge kicking and screaming. At least if she was doing that, she wasn’t crying. He didn’t think he could take much more of watching her cry.

He chased her and caught her at the sidewalk, grabbing her arm and spinning her back around to face him. “No, you bloody well don’t, Buffy Summers!” he snapped. “You don’t get to make accusations and then run away! I know you’ve been hurt – I realize it quite well. I can see it in your actions and I can see it in your eyes. But by God, I am not him, not yet and if I have my way, not bloody well ever! He may have been a fool and a pillock, but I have thankfully not arrived in my dotage yet, and therefore I hopefully on a good day am not. If you’ve an issue with us meeting in your absence, then spit it out and let’s air it now. Don’t run away from me. Not now.”

At first she had cringed away from him, almost as though she were expecting a physical blow, but the more he spoke, the more she looked up at him. When his voice softened on the last two sentences, he saw something flicker in her eyes and he prayed that he’d got through to her. She sniffled, glancing back toward the door, where Willow and Xander stood, looking uncertain. “They… used to do that,” she finally whispered, so softly that he had to lean forward a bit to hear her. “And when I’d come around the corner, they’d stop talking. And then all of a sudden they were going to England and I was going to Rome.”

He nodded, reaching out for her hands. “Buffy, we are not conspiring against you,” he assured her quietly. “It’s true that we were discussing you, but we were discussing the fact that we were concerned about and for you.”

She let him take her hands, looking up at him, her eyes swimming with unshed tears. “Really?”

He nodded. “Really. We worry about you, Buffy. We care about you, and we don’t like to see you in such pain.”

She looked down, and he noticed for the first time that she’d colored her hair again. He reached up to touch the golden strands. “You got tired of the brown?”

She shrugged slightly. “I just… it felt… it…” she trailed off, then shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Giles smiled gently, stroking her hair softly. “I like it,” he told her warmly. “However you choose to wear your hair, it is always beautiful.”

Buffy looked up at him through her eyelashes. “Really?” she asked softly.

He nodded, smiling. “Really. Buffy, you are a beautiful young woman.”

She wiped at her eyes. “No, I’m not,” she said softly. “I’m too skinny because I never eat, and I have circles under my eyes because I can’t sleep.”

“It’s true, you could use some fattening up,” he replied easily, smiling to let her know that it was not a criticism. “But if you’ll let me feed you, then we can take care of that.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he blinked, wondering what had possessed him.

Buffy looked up at him then, directly into his eyes. “What would you feed me?” she asked softly.

His hand slid from the top of her head down to cup her cheek. “Pasta,” he finally said after a moment’s consideration. “I think pasta, in a good red sauce, perhaps with some wine and breadsticks and maybe even a tiramisu afterward.”

The ghost of a smile was present on her lips now. “I like tiramisu,” she acknowledged.

He hesitated only a moment, feeling himself at the edge of some vast chasm beyond which the territory was completely unmapped. There was a sudden frisson of fear crawling up his back. He should not do this. Absolutely should not. There were a million reasons why this was a bad idea, starting with her emotional fragility, moving on to the fact that he was her Watcher, pausing at their age difference and going on from there. Logic dictated that he back away from this insane course of action now, before it was too late.

He took a deep breath and told logic to go hang. “Would you care to go with me tonight, then, Buffy?” he asked softly.

She bit her lip, and he saw his own thoughts mirrored on her face. She knew as well as he that she was not emotionally prepared for this; that their age gap could cause problems; that their Watcher/Slayer relationship could suffer if anything went wrong. And he knew the exact moment when she, too, told good sense to go take a flying leap. She smiled at him – the first genuine smile he’d seen from her since she arrived at his doorstep two weeks ago in this older form. “I’d love to,” she said quietly.


	7. The Face Inside (Is Right Beneath Your Skin)

_Rupert Giles is a Brit, born and raised, and it is a well-known fact that Brits as a race are given to understatement and circumspection. So it is that Rupert Giles may be forgiven if he is caught noting in his private journal that Dawn and the younger version of Buffy do not get along very well. This would, actually, be a bit of an understatement._

_In point of fact, Buffy and Dawn hate one another with a blinding, burning passion. Buffy refuses to acknowledge that Dawn is her sister, even after reading the diaries of her older self. She can perhaps be forgiven for this. She has, after all, no memories of this strange brown-haired girl. Dawn has grown accustomed to being the order-giver in the Summers household and has quite forgotten how to react to a Buffy whose spirit is not bowed and broken. Peace in Rupert Giles’s home only comes now when they are on separate floors of his home. Never before in life has he been so grateful that his flat in London has bedrooms on both floors._

Rupert Giles rubbed his eyes, wishing for the days when he had lived alone. Bringing Buffy and Dawn to London had been the best thing to do for research purposes, to try and figure out how to change Buffy back, but for his peace of mind it had been hell. She and Dawn could not occupy the same room for more than forty-five minutes without fighting about something. Such fights usually ended with two slammed doors. Giles wondered many times over the course of the first two weeks how on earth Joyce had the patience to deal with both of them in the house together. Then he remembered that Joyce’s memories of them together had been false, and that during the time they had been real, they had been marked by turbulence of medical and supernatural natures.

Buffy came out of her bedroom, startling Giles out of his thoughts, dressed in all black: jeans, sweater, boots and knit cap. She was pulling on a pair of gloves as she walked. The sound of her bedroom door closing had startled him from his reverie and he stared at her. “Where are you going?”

“Patrol,” she replied shortly. “England _does_ have vampires occasionally, right?”

“Buffy, I’d really prefer if you didn’t –”

He was cut off by a black-gloved finger pointing dangerously at him. “Don’t start with me. You spent three years training me to patrol every night and take this sacred duty thing seriously. Well, this is me, seriously going out on patrol.”

“Buffy, you don’t know the area, you don’t know your way around –”

“And guess what, Giles? This is England! Home of millions of people who, amazingly enough, speak English! I’m sure if I get lost, I can find someone that can point me in the right direction. I bet _everyone_ in this town knows how to get to Notting Hill, Giles; they even made a movie about it that had Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in it.” She finished pulling on her other glove and turned toward the door.

“Buffy –” he tried again.

She spun to face him, her cheeks red and eyes blazing. “You’re a Watcher, Giles. So you know what? Watch!” With that, she turned and stormed out the door, slamming it hard enough behind her to rattle the pictures hanging on the walls.

He moved to the window in time to watch her golden hair disappearing into the night. He sighed. “Do be careful,” he said softly to himself. Then, shaking his head, he went back to his journal.

_I find myself at a loss to deal with this changed version of Buffy. While I know in my mind that she is the same Buffy that she was two weeks ago, simply the victim of some kind of spell (which, despite her protestations to the contrary, may well be self-induced), my Watcher’s instinct is to react to her as the Buffy that she was before so many things went wrong. The illusion – if, indeed, illusion it truly is – is so very convincing. She speaks as she did then, she walks proudly, she holds her head high and, when I speak to her in Italian, she does not understand a word of it. That in itself may be most telling of all, for Buffy was so very proud of her mastery of the Italian tongue._

_I am, as I said, at a loss. She will have nothing to do with Dawn. Willow, Xander and I have all received the rough side of her tongue on more than one occasion for things she has read in those damnable diaries kept by her “older” self – diaries which she steadfastly refuses any of us to even touch, much less read. After the last explosive incident, which occurred in the presence of his fiancé, Xander will have little to do with Buffy at all. However, I must say that I place at least some of the blame for that squarely on his shoulders. I like Marisa a great deal, but she should not have been brought here for his first meeting with this younger Buffy. I did warn him. Marisa is not Anya, and he would do well to remember that fact._

_It would appear that, when Xander came to see her, despite what I told him over the telephone, he was still expecting somehow to see the older and more tractable Buffy._

He put his pen down and sighed. More tractable? What the hell was he thinking? She wasn’t more tractable. She was broken. He rubbed at his temples. What the hell was he doing?

It was a lot like swimming through a thick fog, working his way through the thoughts in his head, and vaguely, Giles realized that something wasn’t right. What had ever made them think that cutting Buffy off and exiling her in Rome was a good idea? He rubbed at his eyes now, trying to remember. It had all occurred just after the destruction of Sunnydale. He and Willow and Xander had been discussing possibilities for the future, wondering among themselves if Buffy would want to go to England with them and continue to be involved in the Council, and Buffy had gone with Dawn to take care of some things. Then Dawn had come back for something – he couldn’t quite remember that part – and then they had been discussing how they didn’t want Buffy to go with them to England. And then Buffy herself had walked in on them talking. He vaguely remembered thinking that she might have been crying.

Why couldn’t he remember? Why was it so hard? He stood up and began to pace the room, thinking about that incident, and other, similar incidents. When Buffy had tried to kill herself, he had rushed to Rome, fully intending to damn the consequences and bring her back to England to be with him so that he could remind her how much he truly did love her. He had gone to the house to see Dawn first, and then he had gone to the hospital and been distant with Buffy. She had even asked him – practically begged him – to take her home with him, and he had refused. Why?

That Christmas he had called to invite them both to come out, but only Dawn had come. He got the impression from Dawn that Buffy hadn’t wanted to come. Why had he accepted that?

There were dozens of other, smaller incidents. Calling to speak to them both and Buffy being out, then refusing to answer the telephone when she called him back later, for example. Or even recently, when he’d gone for Dawn’s college graduation intending to tell Buffy that it was time for her to come home. After he’d seen Dawn, he’d gone to the little restaurant where Buffy had been. She’d looked like hell, frankly, despite the obvious lengths she’d gone to in order to look nice for him. She was too thin by more than half and she wasn’t sleeping at all if one judged by the circles under her eyes. But she’d been so excited to see him and his own heart had done its familiar dance… right before he told her in not so many words that she’d be remaining in Rome indefinitely, and then walked out on her.

What the hell was wrong with him? He was behaving like a man under a spell or something. He froze in his pacing, turning his head slowly to look up the stairs. No. No, surely not. Not Dawn. He swallowed hard, then moved quietly into his study with his cup of tea, trying very hard to behave normally. He looked around the room slowly, centering himself, wondering which would be the best volume to select. Finally he closed his eyes and whispered the words to a very simple guidance spell, one which would lead the caster to that which they sought. He opened his eyes to find a sparkly sort of haze collected over a set of books at the north end of the study.

He moved over to the shelf and took the two books off the shelf, thought about it for a moment, and then replaced them with a _Complete Works of Shakespeare_ which had been gathering dust on a nearby table. Then he moved to the desk that had been his father’s and sat, looking at the two books. One of them was the _Weisen des Übels_ , or, _Ways of Evil_ ; the other was one of his own Watcher’s diaries. He opened the _Weisen des Übels_ and found that the spell was still active. He flipped to the pages that were sparkling and began to read.

“ _The ways of the Evil are many,”_ the book read in German. _“Possession is a common tool used by the Evil in order to provide it with a temporary body, for the Evil is without form. The Evil may not possess a living host, however; as it takes on the forms, so must it take on the bodies of the dead.”_

The forms of the dead? He suddenly had a deep, sinking suspicion in his gut. He reached for his own journal and opened it.

“ _The First Evil can take on the forms of the dead,”_ he had written, _“but it is incorporeal. I believe its eventual goal is to obtain corporeal form of some sort, but I cannot fathom how this is to be done now that Buffy has killed Caleb. All of my research indicates that whatever body the First intends to inhabit must be enhanced – imbued with mystical power and therefore strong enough to contain the essence of the First Evil. An ordinary human’s body would not be strong enough to contain it. Caleb would have, eventually, but Buffy reports that the First Evil had empowered Caleb and he was very nearly as strong as she. Perhaps a Slayer’s body would be strong enough to be the vessel for the First Evil. I pray that we will never find this out.”_

A Slayer’s body… or perhaps a Key’s?

He rubbed his hand over his face. “Oh, dear God,” he whispered.

He stood, returning to his pacing. Then he stopped, sitting down again, and turned to the end of that diary, where the pages were blank. Picking up a pen, he began to write rapidly. He had no idea if Dawn or the thing which might be living inside Dawn would know that he knew, but he had to assume that at the very least, it had a regular schedule of whatever it did to keep them under its thrall. If he should fail in this, all might well be lost.

Giles wrote furiously for probably forty-five minutes, filling page upon page, and then at last he sat back, sighing. He had done all he could. He closed the book, then walked over to the door of the study and peeked out. The first floor of the house was empty. He strode quickly across the main living room to the guest room which Buffy had claimed for herself. He slipped inside soundlessly and moved to the bed, sliding the book into her pillowcase. He turned away from the bed, intending to leave the room, and his eyes fell on the stack of spiral-bound notebooks on her dresser.

He knew he shouldn’t. It was a breach of trust. But he found himself moving to pick up the first notebook, flipping the cover open, scanning down the first page, flipping the thin pages, scanning the words. And he saw his name, over and over. He read what he had done to her and his heart clenched when in the next lines he read that she forgave him because she loved him so. He wanted to weep. How did he deserve this remarkable woman?

Giles put the notebook back, wanting to get out of Buffy’s room before she came back and caught him looking at the diaries. He slipped out of the room quietly, pulling the door closed, but when he turned around, he discovered that he was caught.

Dawn was standing on the bottom step, dressed in her pajamas, her arms folded beneath her breasts, glaring in his direction. “You’ve been a naughty boy, Giles,” she said softly, and he felt his heart freeze. She stepped down and moved toward him. “Buffy said she didn’t want you reading those. I didn’t want you reading them either. Do you have any idea how hard I’ve worked to break that fucking Watcher-Slayer bond? Do you have any idea of how difficult it is to make a Slayer stop loving her Watcher once she falls? But I’m almost there. As soon as we fix this spell, whatever the little bitch has done to herself, I’m going to finish what I started. And then I’m going to cast this body off like so much detritus and I’m going to have hers. How about that? The greatest Vampire Slayer ever to walk the earth… and she’ll be mine.” Dawn chuckled, and Giles realized that her eyes were completely black, no iris or whites to be seen.

Then the Watcher recoiled as the thing wearing Dawn’s face opened its mouth and a thick, tarry black smoke issued forth, surrounding and enveloping Giles before he could speak or move, and soaking immediately into his skin. That fog he’d fought so hard to throw off earlier in the evening was back, wrapped around his mind, and all he could think about was how angry he was at Buffy for going out patrolling against his wishes. He looked down at Dawn, who stood before him sleepily. “Did you want a cup of tea, Dawn?” he asked her.

She smiled up at him. “Yes, please,” she replied sweetly, moving to sit on the sofa like a little queen.

Giles moved obediently into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Neither of them noticed at the window the pale face and wide eyes of the greatest Vampire Slayer to ever walk the earth.

Buffy dropped to her knees beneath the window, her mind racing. She’d peeked in the window just in time to see Giles leaving her room and so had seen the whole thing. She didn’t know if he was snooping in her room or leaving her a note; she wondered if he’d found out that something was going on before the Dawn-thing had attacked him. She needed to know that before she did anything else. The Slayer took several deep breaths, then rolled slightly to the side of the window before standing again. She had to act normally until she knew more. But she would be wary.

She pushed the door open and entered the house as Giles came out of the kitchen with tea. His face settled into a glare. “I see you made it back,” he began, but she cut him off.

“Don’t start. I’m the Slayer, Giles. I Slay. Get used to it.” She pulled her cap off, ignoring Dawn completely as she had begun doing in the last couple of days. “I’m going to bed.” With that, she moved into her room, shutting the door behind her and then, very slowly and silently, turning the lock. Her eyes darted around the room. Nothing was out of place… except the top notebook on the stack. He’d been looking at her diaries. She wanted to run out there and scream at him, but she held herself back. She had to know what was going on.

Buffy pulled the covers back on her bed, getting ready to get in it, and paused when she saw the square shape inside her pillowcase. She reached in and pulled it out, finding Giles’s Watcher’s diary. Moving to sit in the chair by the window, where the streetlight shone in, she opened the book. Flipping to the back, where he’d slipped in a bookmark, she began to read. Her eyes got wider and wider as she read his carefully detailed suspicions about what had happened to Dawn and what the creature in her body actually might be. When she was done reading, she slipped the small book into the cargo pocket of her pants and pulled her cap back on. Then, silently, she opened the window and climbed out, dropping to the ground on cat’s-feet. Taking a moment to center herself, she whispered a brief prayer to whatever deity might have its ear out for Slayers in a heap of trouble, and then set off into the night at a trot.


	8. Doing the Right Thing Sucks

Joyce blinked when Buffy came downstairs dressed in a simple black dress and sensible medium heels, a thin gold chain-belt around her waist and her hair up in a French twist with several tendrils curling down around her slender neck. The sophisticated clothing combined with her changed appearance made Buffy look closer to Joyce’s age than to her own twenty-seven. The Slayer’s mother moved to her side. “You look so wonderful,” she said softly, reaching up to touch her daughter’s cheek. “You look more like my sister than my daughter,” she added, grinning.

Buffy smiled, then suddenly felt tears begin to gather in her eyes. She bit her lip and finally asked a question which had been plaguing her since the first time she’d laid eyes on her mother two weeks ago. “Mom,” she asked nervously, “do you ever get headaches?”

Joyce looked at her strangely. “Of course I do, Buffy. Everyone does. What do – ” she paused when Buffy’s fingers came up to gently touch the place where Buffy remembered the bandage being.

“Right here,” Buffy whispered. “Are they right here, Mom?”

Joyce’s eyes widened. “What is it, Buffy?” she asked gently.

Buffy swallowed hard. “I want you to talk to your doctor,” she explained in a shaking voice. “Have him look at your head. Please?”

Joyce’s response was forestalled by a firm knock on the front door of the house. She smiled reassuringly at her daughter. “Settle down, now,” she advised warmly. “You don’t want to spoil your makeup.” Buffy nodded, taking several deep breaths to calm herself while Joyce went to the door.

There stood Giles in cream pants, a deep emerald shirt and a smart cream blazer, holding a bouquet of daisies and looking incredibly nervous. He smiled when Joyce opened the door, reached into the bouquet and pulled out a single yellow rose, which he presented to her. “Joyce,” he said gallantly, “may I request the company of your daughter tonight?”

Joyce smiled, taking the rose. “I suppose I can trust you not to keep her out till all hours or run out of gas on Lover’s Lane?” she asked him, a twinkle in her eyes.

He shook his head, speaking earnestly. “I think you know me better than that.”

She nodded, looking down at the rose and then back up at him. “I do know,” she agreed. “You would never do anything to hurt Buffy.”

“That’s correct,” he assured her. “Never in life.”

She stepped back from the door and indicated that he should enter. He stepped in, catching movement in his peripheral vision as he did so, and turned toward the living room. His breath caught in his throat at the sight of Buffy standing there in her black dress, the gold chain around her slim waist glittering and an expression of terrified excitement on her face. “Hello, Buffy,” he said softly, stepping toward her and holding out the flowers.

She moved toward him, a smile spreading slowly across her face, and took the daisies in her hands. “Hi, Giles,” she greeted him, bringing the daisies up to her face. “You remembered,” she commented in a whisper, almost to herself.

Giles nodded. “I did,” he said simply.

They smiled at each other for a long moment before Joyce smoothly interposed herself with a vase full of water. “You’ll miss your reservation,” she warned lightly. “And after Buffy was on time and everything.”

“Mom!” Buffy exclaimed, scandalized. But Giles could see pleasure on her face as well. She had missed being teased by her mother, and it was clear.

Joyce saw the pleasure as well and swept away with the vase, which was now full of daisies. “Be back before daylight!” she admonished as she disappeared into the kitchen.

Buffy smiled up at Giles. “Okay, then,” she said, snickering. “I think we just got told to run along and play.”

“Quite,” he agreed. “Are you ready to go?”

She nodded. “As I’ll ever be.”

“Then let us go. She is right about one thing – I shouldn’t like us to lose our reservation.” He moved toward the door, opening it for her.

“Where are we going?” she asked him as she moved through the door and onto the porch, but his response was lost in her gasp of shock as she took in the shining vehicle sitting at the curb. “Giles! That’s not your car!”

He smiled. “I’m quite aware of that, Buffy,” he returned dryly. “I’ve hired it for the evening. It was a thought I’d had that perhaps nobody had taken you out in style in some time, and I wanted to… remedy that situation.”

She ducked her head, blushing. “Thank you,” she said softly.

He took her hand and led her around to the passenger side of the gleaming Cadillac Escalade, helping her up into the smooth leather seat and then moving around to the driver’s side and sliding in himself. He flashed briefly on the thought that she was so very small in the big SUV – almost birdlike – and then he was turning the car on, its huge V8 engine roaring to life, and he was pulling out onto Revello Drive, and she was watching him out of the corner of her eye with a tiny, secret smile playing about her lips.

He took her to Gino’s, where she had never been before, and she had to suppress a start of unpleasant surprise as they entered because the place looked almost exactly like Giovanni’s little bistro. Then she had to suppress a start of entirely pleasant surprise as Giles’s warm hand settled in the small of her back, guiding her gently to their table as they followed the maitre d’. Giles pulled her chair out for her when she sat, smiling down at her and making her heart beat faster. Then he sat down in the chair next to her and spoke softly in Italian.

“I hope you are quite hungry,” he told her in his low, rich voice. “I have every intention of feeding you very well.”

Buffy smiled at him. “I’m hungry enough,” she responded, also in Italian. “And I believe you promised me tiramisu.”

They looked up from their not-quite-flirting conversation when the waiter approached. He was an older man with a thick Italian accent who seemed delighted when they both ordered and conversed with him in Italian. He asked them where they had learned to speak his native tongue; Giles explained that he’d learned it at university and Buffy stated proudly that she’d learned it in self-defense while living in Rome for four years. The waiter turned out to be Roman and spent a few minutes pleasantly discussing some of the sights of Rome with Buffy before going to turn their order in to the kitchen.

Their dinner progressed slowly and pleasantly; Watcher and Slayer walked a fine line between conversation and flirting all night that neither of them was willing to be the first one to cross. They enjoyed seafood, pasta and tiramisu and Giles cajoled Buffy into eating more in one meal than she thought she had eaten in perhaps the last three months of her sojourn in Rome.

When dinner was over, Giles took Buffy downtown and they simply walked, hand in hand, pretending that nothing was wrong and simply enjoying being together. They ended up on the boardwalks at the beach and stood together on the end of one of the piers for a very long time, being silent together and simply contemplating the stars. Then Giles felt Buffy shiver and turned to look down at her, intending to suggest that he take her home.

She raised herself on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his, gently seeking, burning his soul with that simple touch. And though it cut him deeply, rending deep furrows in his soul, he responded for only a moment before pulling back from her. He was shaking his head when she opened her eyes, confused and afraid she’d done the wrong thing. “Not yet, Buffy,” he said softly.

Buffy’s eyes were riveted to his, and he could read the confusion in them. “Why not, Giles?” she asked him. It was not the petulant question of a child denied some treat, but a genuine confusion. “I want, I think you want; so why not?”

He smiled, reaching up to gently smooth away the furrow that was forming between her brows. “Because it isn’t time yet,” he said softly. “It’s too soon. I… my intent tonight wasn’t to seduce you. My intent was to bring you out, to show you a good time, to allow you to enjoy yourself. And while there is nothing I should like better to do at this moment than kiss you until your knees went weak, it wouldn’t be right, and I believe that you know it. You are still hurting very badly, and I don’t desire or intend to take advantage of you when you are less than whole, emotionally speaking.”

She puzzled through the words for a moment, then suddenly gave a tentative smile. “So, translating from Giles to English, you don’t think I’m ready and you’re trying to do the right thing?”

He smiled back, relieved that she understood. “Yes, Buffy,” he confirmed. “That’s exactly it. When the time comes that you are heart-whole and you still want me to kiss you, then I shall kiss you as you have never before been kissed. But just yet, it’s not time. And I would rather wait than have you grow to hate me for taking advantage of you.”

“I could never hate you,” she whispered, and he felt his heart clench as he realized the truth of those words. Whatever might happen, whatever had happened to her, she had managed to hold onto her feelings for him through it all. But he had to be sure.

He raised his hand and stroked her cheek gently with the backs of his fingers. “My Buffy,” he said softly. “You are so very beautiful.”

She leaned into the caress, her eyes shining up at him in the pale light. “My Giles,” she whispered back. “My knight in shining armor.”

He scoffed just a little, but she could see that he was also blushing in pleasure. “It’s a bit dented,” he protested.

“So what?” she asked softly. “So’s mine.”

He nodded, then reached down and pressed a chaste kiss to her forehead. “Come on, then, Buffy. It’s time you were home.”

She sighed deeply. “Doing the right thing sucks sometimes.”

He chuckled. “Indeed. But I think you’ll thank me in the morning.”

It turned out that he was wrong.


	9. Apocalypse Again

Giles had taken Dawn and Buffy to the new Council headquarters, showing them around proudly, and Buffy went there first, wondering if she might find a Watcher or another Slayer who could help her. The Council offices were located in what had once been a bank building in the heart of London and she found her way there fairly easily, only having to backtrack twice.

The building was dark and empty when Buffy arrived, the only person in view being a derelict in the public park across the street who was asleep on a bench. Buffy dithered for a long moment, wondering what to do. She moved up to the glass front doors, peering in, and her eyes fell on something she’d noticed before when on the grand tour of the building.

There was an axe hanging on the wall of the main lobby. It wasn’t just any axe, either. It was shiny and silver with red accents and one end of it was a sharp stake, polished to a high glossy shine. And it was calling to her. She could feel its pull from out in the street. She wanted that axe, and she wanted it badly. Buffy looked around. It was the middle of the night; no one was around. Surely she could make it in and out before any burglary alarm summoned police.

The Slayer moved cautiously toward the doors, intending only to test them and see how secure they were. However, the moment her reaching hand was laid on the brass handle, the metal began to warm under her touch and the door clicked open, swinging wide to admit her. She stood frozen in the doorway for a long moment, unable to believe her luck. No alarms went off; no police were summoned. The only thing she heard was the steady call of the axe on the wall display and her own heartbeat thundering in her ears.

And then she saw a shadow move in the back of the room. Buffy’s eyes darted to it and she nearly screamed as an old man stepped silently out of the darkness. “Hello, young Slayer,” he said to her gently with a slight Scottish accent. “Enter, please.”

She stepped into the lobby warily, circling widely around the room away from him, toward her goal. “Who are you?” she asked sharply. “How do you know I’m a Slayer?”

He chuckled. “The doors,” he replied. “They are bespelled. Once locked at sundown, only the touch of a Slayer can unlock them before sunrise. No demon or human of ill-intent may cross the threshold. Thus is this place a safe haven for all Slayers.”

“And who the heck are you?” Buffy repeated.

“I am… a caretaker,” the man replied after a moment. He gestured to the axe. “Do you seek the Scythe?”

She looked up at the object in question. “That’s not a scythe,” she objected. “It’s an axe.”

He chuckled. “Why, so it is. I couldn’t say how it came to be called the Scythe, but it’s been called that since before it came to be on that wall.” He nodded encouragingly. “Go on. Touch it. They all do.”

She reached up tentatively and laid a hand on the cold metal of the axe blade. A sudden, warm thrill ran through her body and Buffy gasped. “Oh, wow,” she whispered, a soft sort of ecstasy gripping her. “It’s… it… it feels like… it’s mine.”

“It is yours, young Slayer,” the man said gently, moving closer to her. “Yours and every other Slayer’s that’s ever walked. Are you so new to the life, then, that you know nothing about what and who you are, and where you come from?”

She glared at him. “I’ve been the Slayer since I was fifteen years old,” she snapped. “If you know so much about Slayers, don’t you know who Buffy Summers is?”

“Aye, I do,” he responded easily. “Buffy Summers is twenty-seven years old and is retired, living peacefully now in Rome.”

“Wrong,” she replied. “Buffy Summers is eighteen and a half, and she’s coming out of retirement.” Buffy reached up and pulled the axe down off the wall, gripping it, testing the heft, and giving it a couple of practice swings. “I’ve got a demon to slay.”

The old man’s eyebrow cocked. “Have you, now?”

She nodded once, firmly, looking over at him with a determined expression. “Something’s got my Watcher,” she said flatly. “I’m not a hundred percent sure what, but… he thought it was the First Evil, and that’s good enough for me.” She looked at the axe in her hand. “Will this thing kill the First Evil?”

“Nothing can kill the First Evil, lass,” the man replied seriously. “Nothing save the transformation of this world into a complete Utopia.” He stepped toward her. “Has it taken on flesh, then?”

She pulled Giles’s book out of her pocket and offered it to him. “That’s what I know.”

He read the pages Giles had enscribed, frowning as he did so. “The body of the Key? The First Evil inhabits the body of the Key?”

Buffy nodded. “Giles thinks so. It’s pretending to be my sister.”

“Beheading the body will temporarily remove the parasite,” the man mused, looking into the dark and obviously thinking deeply. “But the body will need to be completely destroyed to prevent it coming back. I must think.” He began to pace.

She watched him for a moment, then finally spoke. “Do you have a name?”

He smiled faintly. “Charles,” he said quietly. “My name is Charles.”

“Well, Charles, pacing is good, but it’s not getting me any closer to killing the thing that’s got Giles.”

He nodded. “All right. You need a conflagration spell. Wait here.” He turned and disappeared through a wide doorway and down a long, dark hallway.

“Wait here. Great.” Buffy sighed. While she was waiting, she took a couple more practice swings with the axe. Then she took a couple more. Then she began to test the different ways she could hold it and use it. “Holy crap,” she whispered to herself. “This thing is great! And they’ve got it on a wall? Now I _know_ Giles is possessed.”

There was a sound of footsteps and Charles returned, emerging from the darkness like a wraith, holding out a small cloth bag. “This is the spell,” he told her, offering it by the pull-strings. “Be careful with it.”

“What do I have to do to work it?” Buffy asked, taking the bag and rolling it carefully, then slipping it into her pocket.

“You throw the powder on the body of the host, once you have removed the head, and you say the word ‘ _incendere_ ’,” he instructed.

“That’s it?” she asked, skeptical.

“That’s it,” he replied reassuringly.

She sighed. “Okay, then,” she said. “Well, if the apocalypse comes, you’ll know I screwed up.”

Charles smiled at her, reaching over to pat her reassuringly on the shoulder. “I have faith in you,” he replied.

“Well, somebody needs to,” she replied, then turned and headed out the door.

“Buffy,” Charles called out.

She paused, turning to face him. “Yeah?”

“Tell him. Before it is too late, tell him what you have not. Only when all is revealed will you return home.”

Buffy took a step back, her face taking on a strange expression. “What are you talking about?”

Charles stepped toward her. “When you awoke in Rome, who did you seek even before your mother? Whose distrust cut you more to the quick than all the slings and arrows thrown at you by childhood insults? Three people are under the thrall of this evil and your sister gave her life to it; for whose safety are you most concerned?” He pointed an aged finger at her. “Tell him.”

She stared at him for a long moment, wordless, then turned and fled from the open doorway, axe in hand, pelting down the empty London streets and back toward Notting Hill as fast as she could run. The door closed softly behind her and Charles smiled softly. “I have faith in you,” he repeated in a whisper, and then vanished.

The house was dark and quiet when Buffy approached. The window to her downstairs bedroom was still open and so she assumed her absence had not been noted. She climbed back inside silently and stood very still, centering herself and then opening her awareness outward. Her Watcher was asleep upstairs on the other end of the house, but above her, the slumbering malevolence was clear. It wasn’t evil so much as it was simply a sort of “wrongness”, and Buffy assumed that whatever a Key was, its presence was masking that of the evil.

She took a deep breath, firmed her grip on the handle of the axe, and unlocked her bedroom door. She stepped out into the main room of the house and then kicked off her shoes in the spirit of moving silently. In sock feet she crept across the living room and up the stairs.

At the top of the stairs, Buffy stood still for a full minute, listening with human and Slayer senses. She could hear Giles’s light snores coming from the right-hand end of the hall. From the left, she simply got that faint sense of slumbering malevolence that she’d gotten before. She took a deep breath. Whatever the thing was, it looked human, and this was running very close to that whole fiasco with Faith last year. She closed her eyes. It was evil. Nothing human, not even bad humans, ever felt like that.

She straightened her shoulders, walked to the end of the hall, and tried the doorknob. It turned easily in her hand and she paused to wonder if the thing was that self-confident or if she was walking into a trap. _Well,_ she decided, _too late to worry about it now._ She pushed the door open.

Dawn lay on the bed, apparently asleep, moonlight from the open window streaming in on her peaceful face. She wore a T-shirt and boxer shorts, and the shirt had ridden up, exposing her stomach. Buffy recoiled at what she saw there. A puncture wound, probably delivered by a sword or knife blow, split the girl’s stomach wide open. There was something holding the entrails in – Buffy didn’t want to examine close enough to see what the substance was. She swallowed back the intense desire to vomit and moved forward.

In two steps she was by the bed. She raised the axe high above her head in preparation for the blow. She swallowed hard, tensing her muscles to bring the weapon down, when the girl’s eyes flew open. “Giles!” Dawn screamed. The black, tarry fog began to flow from her mouth. Giles’s door down the hall burst open and he came barreling into the room.

“Buffy, stop!” Giles screamed.

The fog thickened around Buffy, trying to fight its way into her as it had into Giles earlier that evening, but some magic within the axe she held fought it back. Giles moved toward her, reaching for the axe, and Buffy brought it down on Dawn’s neck, severing the head from the shoulders in one stroke.

There was a horrible, primal scream which echoed as though from the pits of hell, and the black fog contracted away from Buffy, pulling as it did so out of Giles and also out of the corpse on the bed. It formed into a vision of a huge, red-eyed monster, which menaced them from midair. “Fools!” it screamed in a voice choked with evil. “You cannot destroy me! I will have this body and soon I will have the Slayer! You cannot stop me!”

It formed back into smoke again, moving back toward the headless body on the bed, but Buffy was reaching into her pants pocket and pulling out the bag Charles had given her. She turned it up over the body and poured the dust from the severed head all the way down to the feet.

“Buffy, what are you doing?” Giles asked, panting and confused.

She ignored him. “ _Incendere_!” she shouted. The powder on the body burst into flames, and a moment later, the body caught as well.

The black fog pulled away again, thwarted, and the evil voice screamed out once more. “You cannot! How did you? You could not defeat me!”

“Never underestimate the Slayer,” Buffy snapped, moving to Giles’s side. “Get the hell out of here, whatever you are, and don’t come back!”

The fog screamed one last time, and then dissipated out the window and into the night. Buffy turned to Giles. “Are you okay, Giles?” she asked softly.

He looked down at her. “Yes, Buffy, of course, I’m fine,” he said, taking a step away from the wall he’d been leaning on, moving toward the smoldering ashes on the bed. And then his knees buckled underneath him and he went down.


	10. Full Circle Round

Buffy was beaming when she let herself into her mother’s house. The evening had ended so well. Giles had walked her to the door when they arrived back at the house on Revello and they had stood there talking in the warm yellow glow of the porch light.

“So, Giles,” she asked him, “what’s with the Escalade? I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s very nice, bordering on the swanky, even; it just doesn’t seem like you. You strike me as more the… sporty red two-door convertible type.” She grinned.

He blushed, pulling his glasses off and cleaning them before responding. “Well, I must confess, Buffy; I very nearly chose a black BMW. But then I saw the Escalade and somehow it reminded me of you.”

“It did?” she asked, genuinely surprised. “How so?”

He turned and looked out toward the street at the vehicle in question. “It’s a very expensive automobile, Buffy,” he explained, “which by extension means that it is valuable and precious. It is also, one must admit, a very attractive automobile.” He paused and smiled at her. When she smiled back, he continued. “It is flashy; it stands out; it is larger than life; and I find that you are all of these things. And… I rather thought… that you would like it.”

Buffy was staring at him in wonder, her eyes glistening. “Really?” she asked him softly. “You really think all that good stuff about me?”

Giles nodded, reaching up to cup her cheek with his hand. “I do, Buffy. You are all those things. You have always been all those things to me.”

A tear trickled down Buffy’s cheek even as her face creased in a brilliant smile. “That’s the best thing anybody’s ever said to me. Like, in my life. Ever.”

He cocked his head slightly, mildly perturbed. “You’ve dated boys before, Buffy, and men as well. Surely they’ve paid you similar flowery compliments.”

She gave him a tolerantly font look. “Let’s run down the list of men I’ve dated – and I’m using the terms ‘men’ and ‘dated’ fairly loosely,” she warned. Then she began ticking off a list on her fingers. “First there was the string of football and basketball players in middle and early high school. Then there was Pike who, while sweet, was not high on poetry. Other things, maybe, but not poetry. Then I moved to Sunnydale and there was Mr. Broody Mc King-of-Pain, who was too busy with his personal little black cloud of doom. Then there was Parker Abrams, who actually gets an award for being the only human being on the planet whose attention span is shorter than that of a housefly on crack.” Buffy rolled her eyes, gratified when he giggled.

She ticked a third finger. “Next up, we have the Corn-Fed Iowa Boy himself, Lieutenant Finn, whose idea of a romantic evening started with patrol with his squad and ended when he got his happy, whether or not I got mine.” Her sour expression spoke volumes about how often she ‘got hers’. She rolled her eyes again. “And then there was Sp-” she froze, her eyes taking on a deer-in-the-headlights expression as she realized what she’d almost said.

He watched the color drain out of her face and felt his gut clench: he knew what she’d been about to say. But she was going to have to tell him herself. He took her hands, drawing her with him into the shadows and sitting next to her on the bench at the end of the porch. “Buffy,” he said softly, “whoever it was, whatever it is, it is in the past. Don’t let the shadow of that past keep you in fear. Whatever it is, Buffy, tell me.”

She bowed her head. “Spike,” she finally said softly, her voice thick with guilt and shame. “I was sleeping with Spike. After… after I came back… I couldn’t feel anything. He made me feel. I didn’t like what I was feeling, but it was better than being dead inside.” She paused, swallowed hard, and added in a near-whisper, “I broke it off, finally… but he wouldn’t stop coming around; he wouldn’t stop wanting it. And then he came in the house one night when I was alone. I’d taken a headstone in the kidneys about an hour earlier and I was really feeling it, so I wasn’t moving very fast. And h-he c-cornered me and he w-wouldn’t take n-no for an answer.” She shuddered hard. “I… I finally got enough leverage to throw him off me, but…” she shrugged, shaking her head. She wouldn’t look at him. She was too afraid of what she’d see in his eyes: anger, disappointment, disgust.

Giles put two fingers under her chin and nudged her up to face him. There was a deep sadness in his eyes, but there was also love and understanding. “I’m sorry, Buffy,” he murmured. “I’m so dreadfully sorry that you had to experience that. But it was not your fault. You must listen, and you must believe me. From what you tell me, you had just been through a serious trauma and he played on your weakened emotions. I do not believe you were at fault in anything that happened with Spike, no matter what your motivations may have been. And I will give you no recriminations or guilt. I told you: it’s in the past. Outside of making certain that you heal, what happened before no longer matters.”

With a small sound of distress, she lunged forward suddenly and wrapped her arms around him. He laid one arm across her shoulders, the other hand moving up to gently caress her cheek. His voice was soft, whispering reassurances in her ear.

A motion in his periphery caught his attention and he glanced up to see Joyce peering out of the living room window. She took in the sight of Buffy and Giles’s embrace expressionlessly for about thirty seconds before locking eyes with Giles. One of her eyebrows went up questioningly. Giles smiled slightly, never ceasing his light stroking of Buffy’s cheek or the soft reassurances he was whispering. Joyce watched them for a long moment, her face unreadable. Then Buffy lifted her head, looking up into Giles’s eyes. Joyce dropped the curtain. A moment later, the living room light dimmed.

Giles looked down into the wide hazel eyes, made larger by the thinness of her face. She was studying him carefully, her eyes darting back and forth between his. “Giles?” she whispered.

“Yes, Buffy?” he asked her, his voice low and velvety.

“Is my mom gone?” she asked with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes.

He smiled. “Yes. I believe she’s gone upstairs.”

“Good.” She continued to study him for a long moment. “Would you do something for me if I asked you to?” she asked him softly.

“In all likelihood, Buffy,” he responded. “What would you like me to do?”

She lifted her face to him. “I’d like you to kiss me.”

“Buffy, I told you, I don’t believe you’re ready for –”

She silenced his protests by laying her index finger lightly across his lips. “Giles, I’m not asking you to sneak upstairs and make love to me in my mother’s house. I know I’m not ready for that. I don’t think you are, either. I’m just asking you to kiss me. Please?”

Giles swallowed hard, looking down into those huge, hypnotic eyes. His hand moved to cup her cheek and she leaned into the caress, nuzzling slightly. His hand slid back, his fingers sliding into her hair at the nape of her neck. Buffy’s head fell back slightly, her lips parting just the tiniest bit. His thumb swept idly across her cheek, feeling the sweet softness of her skin, and he slowly lowered his mouth to hers.

Giles’s lips touched Buffy’s with a gentleness that reached right in and wrapped itself around her heart. At first his lips barely brushed hers: seeking, questioning; and she whimpered low in her throat. His lips brushed hers again, a feather’s gentle stroke, and then a third time, more firmly. Buffy pressed herself into him, his warmth and nearness making her dizzy. She gasped when she felt his tongue gently touch her lips, then tentatively reached out with her own tongue to touch his.

All he could think was that she tasted sweet. God, she was so sweet. Her hands clutched at his waist and her mouth opened beneath his sensual assault, inviting him to enter and explore the warm cavern; he did so with pleasure, sliding his tongue against hers and tasting the faint echo of the wine they’d shared at dinner. A whimper slipped out of her and his hand tightened on the back of her neck, his other hand splayed wide across her back.

There was a rushing in Buffy’s head, the kind of giddy dizziness of a small child just off a merry-go-round that went a little too fast. She felt as though the world was spinning around her and all she could do was hold onto him, clutching desperately and falling into the delicious sensation of his mouth on hers.

When he finally released her mouth, Buffy’s eyes were dilated and her lips swollen. Her hair was a little mussed from his hands being buried in it, and her breath was coming in quick, shallow pants. Her heart was beating so hard in her chest that she was afraid it would burst out at any moment, and all she could think was that she wanted more – so much more.

He soothed her cheeks with his thumbs until her breathing had calmed down, then smiled down at her, his own eyes dark with his desire. “You’d best go on inside now, Buffy,” he said softly. “Your mum’s probably waiting up for you.”

She wanted to protest; she wanted him to kiss her again. But she could see on his face that his control was slipping. Neither of them was ready for this to go to the next level and if she pushed it, there would undoubtedly be badness. She nodded, standing. He walked with her over to the front door, waited until she had stepped inside, and then took her hand, bringing the palm up to his lips for a final kiss. “Good night, Buffy,” he whispered. Then he was gone, down the sidewalk and headed for his car.

She watched him get into the Escalade and drive away, then turned away from the front door, shutting and locking it behind her, a huge, silly grin on her face.

She felt like she was floating in a dream. His kiss had been unlike any other she’d ever experienced. God, but that man was just exactly what she needed. She took two steps forward, heading for the stairs, and then fell to her knees on the rug with a soft thump as an excruciating pain wracked her body.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to scream out her pain to the world; she had never felt pain like this before in her life. It was as though every cell of her body were on fire. She would have screamed, but she couldn’t draw breath through the pain.

At first, she thought the blackness before her was due to her lack of oxygen and that she was passing out. Then she looked down slightly and realized that it was not: it was actually coming out of her. It was a smoky, tarry substance and it was probably that, according to some analytical part of her mind that kept functioning through the agony, which was causing her pain. It was definitely that which was causing her fear.

The pain ended as abruptly as it had begun the moment the smoke finished pouring out of her body, leaving a tingling sort of sensation behind it. She dropped to all fours, panting, then looked up toward the thick, oily cloud which hung above her, menacingly. “Wh-what…?” she panted.

A voice she recognized only too well screamed out at her from the thick cloud. “You cannot escape me! I will have you!”

She coughed slightly. “Looks… like I did,” she said softly, baring her teeth in a frightening grin. “You’re over there and I’m over here.”

The cloud flew at her, obviously intending to re-enter her body forcefully, but was deflected at the last moment, almost as though bouncing off an invisible force field around Buffy. It screamed in fury and tried again and again, battering itself against whatever wall was there, trying to get to her. It could not. Thwarted, it roared out its fury and vanished out into the night, pouring itself through the wooden front door.

Buffy remained on her knees for a long moment. “Well,” she finally said aloud to herself. “That was something entirely new and different.” She reached for the banister, pulling herself to her feet shakily. Then she took one step forward and collapsed on the stairs, her head striking the risers with a sharp thump.


	11. Boldly Going

She caught him as he fell, supporting him with her strength easily. He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Buffy? Buffy, what’s going on?”

“Just relax, Giles,” she encouraged. She started to move him into the nearby chair and decided against it. The scent of cooking meat was thick in the air. She guided him out of the room instead, down the hall and toward the stairs. “C’mon, Giles, walk with me. I can’t carry you; you’re too tall.”

By leaning on her and going slowly, he managed to stay upright all the way down the stairs. Buffy helped him over to the couch, admonished him to stay there, and went into the kitchen. She put the kettle on and got a tea tray, setting up the tea things quickly and efficiently. The kettle began to whistle and she took it off the heat, pouring the water into the teapot. Then she brought the whole setup into the living room. She poured him a cup of tea, wrapping both of his hands around it, then gently touched his forehead. “You okay?”

He nodded, sipping at the tea. “I am. Or I will be.”

Buffy nodded as well. “I’ll be right back.” She squared her shoulders and went back upstairs.

The stench of burning flesh hung heavy in the room, but where there had been a corpse there was now a large pile of ash. The coverlet was not even singed. Buffy pulled the window open, letting in a rush of cool fresh air, then took the coverlet to the window. She shook it thoroughly, making sure all the ash and dust was gone before bringing it back into the room and laying it across the bed again. She straightened the covers, resetting the pillows, making sure that nothing in the room seemed amiss. Once the room looked uninhabited, except for the few things of Dawn’s which lay on the table, she stepped back and nodded. Then she grabbed the axe from where it had fallen on the floor and headed back downstairs to check on Giles.

He was still sipping at his tea on the sofa. He looked better than he had; there was color on his face and his complexion no longer resembled curdled milk. His hands had mostly stopped shaking, and he seemed fairly calm. As she came down the stairs, his eyes tracked immediately to the axe she carried and his eyebrows went up in shock. “How on Earth did you get that?”

“I went to the Council building and took it,” she replied, “after I read your book.” She pulled the journal out of her cargo pocket and offered it to him. “Do you remember doing that?”

He looked at the book as though he’d never seen it before for a long time, then slowly reached for it. He opened it and flipped to the page that was still marked by his slip of paper, scanning the words written in his own distinctive handwriting. “As if it were something I’d done in a dream,” he said finally. “It’s very indistinct. Almost unreal.”

She nodded, sitting down in a chair and leaning the axe against the coffee table. “Well, I went down to the Council. It was all dark, but the doors opened for me which, just by the way, creepy! Anyway, so I talked to Charles, and he’s the one who gave me the powder stuff to burn the body because he said otherwise the First thing would be able to take it back over again and then we’d be right back at square one. And I got the axe off the wall, came back, went upstairs, and… you know the rest.”

“Charles?” Giles cocked his head curiously.

“Yeah.” Buffy made a face. “And then he told me a whole bunch of weird stuff about telling people things I hadn’t told them yet in order to break spells.” She shuddered delicately. “I _really_ didn’t like him.”

Giles smiled at the sudden memory brought by her unconscious echo of herself and then questioned her curiously. “What did he look like, Buffy?”

“Old,” the Slayer replied immediately. When her Watcher sighed impatiently, she hastened to defend herself. “No, I mean it. _Really_ old. Not just old _er_. He was like ninety years old or something. All wrinkled and crazy white hair, looking like Doc Brown or something. Really dark eyes, too, like maybe he was part Mexican or something.”

Giles’s eyebrows raised. “Buffy… we haven’t –” he was cut off by the telephone ringing. Buffy stood and went to get the portable receiver, which she brought to him. He pressed the button and raised it to his ear. “Yes, hello?”

“Giles?” It was Willow.

“Yes, Willow,” he replied, raising an eyebrow at Buffy. Buffy shrugged and sat down in the chair, nibbling on a cookie.

“Is everything okay over there? Because I just had… what might have been a really bad dream brought on by too much spicy curry.”

“What happened, Willow?” he inquired.

“Well, I was asleep, and so hence the maybe-it-was-a-dream,” she began, “but all of a sudden I woke up feeling like I was on fire. Literally like I was burning inside my skin. I might have yelled – I’m not sure. And I was trying to walk across the room, but I couldn’t. I fell down, and when I did, this black smoke stuff came out of me and hovered over me like it was trying to get back inside. And then it screamed and it flew off out the window.”

“You say the smoke… screamed?” he repeated.

“I know it sounds completely whacked-out,” Willow replied, slightly defensively, “but it’s true.”

“I believe you,” Giles responded immediately in a soothing tone. “We had something of a battle here tonight, you see, and I was simply confirming that what you experienced was similar to what I experienced.”

“You did, too?” Willow was genuinely shocked.

“I did,” Giles replied. “As far as I can tell, I believe that you and I, and probably Xander, and perhaps even our version of Buffy, were possessed by the First Evil. Buffy has defeated it once again.”

“The First Evil?” Willow repeated. “But… Sunnydale… the Hellmouth… I thought it was gone!”

Giles shook his head, even though Willow couldn’t see it. “No, Willow,” he explained gently. “As long as there is evil in the world, we shall know that we have not banished the First. It will always be there. We can prevent some of its machinations, but we cannot kill an eternal entity. And we wouldn’t want to.”

At that, Buffy’s own eyebrows went up. “We wouldn’t?” she asked, at precisely the same moment that Willow did the same.

“No, we wouldn’t,” he explained patiently. “Nature abhors a vacuum, does it not? The death of one eternal being would create just such an imbalance. If the First Evil died then, in all likelihood, so would its ‘good’ counterpart. That, or something even worse would rise to fill the void.”

“Oh,” Buffy and Willow said together again, and Buffy continued. “That would be… bad.”

“Indeed,” Giles replied dryly, cocking an eyebrow at her. “But, Willow, you’ll be fine. Drink some tea and go back to bed. You’ll probably feel just fine tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Willow replied. “Will do. Say goodnight to Buffy for me? And tell her I said good job?”

“I will, Willow. Good night.”

“Bye.” Willow rang off, and Giles turned to Buffy.

“Willow sends her compliments on a job well done,” he began. “Now, I was going to ask you about this Charles fellow. We don’t have –” But he was cut off again by the phone’s shrill ring. With a sigh, he picked it up and pressed the button. “Hello?”

“Mr. Giles?” It was Marisa, Xander’s fiancé. “Mr. Giles, it’s Xander, there’s… oh, it was horrible!”

“Was it black smoke that screamed?” Giles hazarded.

“Why, yes, how did you know?” she asked.

He chuckled slightly. “Welcome to our world, Marisa. Is Xander able to speak?”

“Yes, I’ll put him on. Won’t be a mo.” There was a bit of rustling, and then Xander came on the line.

“Hey, Giles,” Xander said, slightly weak. “What the frilly heck is going on now?”

“The First Evil,” Giles replied succinctly. “Buffy took care of it again.”

Willow’s surprise was repeated, and Giles explained again about nature and imbalances. When he was done, Xander asked something that Willow had not. “Giles… what about Dawn? Is she okay?”

Giles was silent for a long moment. “Dawn…” his voice cracked and he had to pause to clear his throat. “Dawn has been the host for the First, Xander. As far as I can tell, since Sunnydale was destroyed. She appeared to have taken a sword or knife to the stomach, and was being reanimated by the spirit of the First.”

Xander choked back a sob. “She… she’s dead?”

“She’s been dead, Xander,” Giles said softly. “We were simply deceived.”

“I… I can’t… I gotta go,” Xander said softly and rang off immediately.

Giles sighed deeply. “I’ll have to go by and check on him later,” he said softly. Then he turned to Buffy. “There isn’t anyone at the Council who matches your description,” he said quickly, hoping not to be interrupted again. The Watcher on duty tonight should have been Margaret Harding.” He cocked his head at her curiously. “What exactly did he say to you?”

Buffy looked uncomfortable. “Just some kind of crap about telling somebody something to make the spell end,” she hedged.

“To tell who what?” Giles pressed. He was studying her reactions intently. If some being had taken a hand in what happened and was giving her directions on how to end the spell and bring his proper Buffy back to him, well… he had some reparations to make.

But Buffy wasn’t cooperating. “Tea!” she exclaimed, grabbing the nearly scalding pot and hurrying toward the kitchen. “Tea’s getting cold. I’ll get some hot water.”

Giles stared after her, astonished. She was behaving quite strangely. He listened to her clattering around the kitchen and knew what she was doing; he did it often enough himself. It was a defense mechanism – hiding until one could control one’s emotions and facial expressions.

When Buffy came back into the room with a new pot of tea, the smile she’d pasted on looked almost like a grimace of pain. “So, Giles,” she asked him in a seemingly abrupt change of subject, “Where’s Olivia been hiding this whole time we’ve been here?”

Giles nearly dropped his cup. “Olivia?” he asked as though not sure he’d heard her properly.

“Yeah, Olivia. Your supermodel girlfriend?”

He swallowed hard, getting a sudden inkling of just what might be going on. Surely not… but then why else would she bring up Olivia? “Buffy, Olivia married an architect and settled down in Liverpool about a year after her last visit to Sunnydale. She’s three children now and a successful investments firm.”

A shudder passed through Buffy. “So who are you dating now?” she asked lightly.

“Buffy, why does that –” He stopped suddenly, studying her. She was hunched over her teacup like a woman who expects some painful blow. Her hands were shaking and she wouldn’t look at him. He set his cup down on the table. “Buffy, what is it that you need to tell me?”

She shook her head, and he could see the gleam of tears on her cheeks. He stood, testing the strength of his knees for a moment before moving around to her side. “Buffy, please,” he said softly, touching her shoulder. “Talk to me.”

She was silent for a long time, and then finally whispered, “I can’t. You don’t want me.”

He started. “What?”

“Well, you don’t!” Suddenly she was angry. She slapped her cup down on the table and stood, moving away from him. “You think I’m stupid, and you think I’m just a kid and I don’t know what I want. But you’re wrong. I do know.”

“Tell me, Buffy,” he encouraged her softly.

She shook her head, fighting back tears. “Riley doesn’t like you. He’s jealous of you.”

“Of me?” Giles repeated, confused by the sudden change of subject. “What for?”

“Because he knows!” she yelled, exasperated. “He knows how I feel and it makes him furious that it’s not him, okay? He wants me to love him and I can’t, and he knows that it’s because I already love you!”

He stared at her, astonished, and watched as her face flushed. She looked for a long moment as though she had swallowed her tongue. Then she bolted for the door. “Buffy, don’t leave!” he shouted as she snatched the door open and darted out onto the stoop.

She paused in her headlong flight and turned back toward him, opening her mouth to say something. Then her feet somehow tangled together and she fell, arms pinwheeling. She fell over both the steps onto the sidewalk, her head striking the cement pathway with a sickening crunch.


	12. Mirror, Mirror

“Why is it so dark?” a young boy’s voice asked.

“In the beginning,” replied a young girl, “it is always dark.”

There was silence for a moment, and then there was a sudden, soft glow. It grew brighter and brighter, illuminating a space of complete nothingness inhabited by two small figures. They looked at one another across the glow, which the girl held in her hand. The boy spoke. “What’s that?” he asked.

“One grain of sand,” the girl answered. “It is all that remains of my vast empire.”

“Oh, cut the crap.” A voice cut across the serene little vista and the two children disappeared, leaving only the light. Buffy Summers, aged twenty-seven, strode forward into the glow. “If I wanted to watch _The Neverending Story_ , I’d rent the DVD. Get out here. I haven’t got all day, you know.”

Buffy Summers, aged eighteen, stepped tentatively into the very edge of the circle of light. “What the heck is going on?”

“I got played, that’s what’s going on,” the older Buffy snapped. “I never said ‘I wish’, and Anya said you had to. It was a rule. I got played and you got dragged into it.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about that guy in Giovanni’s making like a vengeance demon. Two weeks I’ve been thinking I made a wish; well, I didn’t!” The older Buffy, still dressed in her date outfit, began to pace.

The younger Buffy raised an eyebrow. “Why are you dressed like you’re going out on a date?”

“I just came back,” the elder replied. “Giles took me out for Italian and then kissed me on the bench.” She paused in her pacing, a giddy expression crossing her face. “That was… wow.”

The younger Buffy gaped at the older. “You kissed Giles?”

“Uh-huh.” The older one nodded. “And don’t try to even pretend you don’t want to. I’m you, remember?”

The younger girl sighed. “I want to. He doesn’t want me.”

“Hello!” The older version snapped her fingers under the younger one’s nose. “You – me – same person!”

“Yeah, but you’re all… older. He thinks I’m just a kid.”

“Maybe ‘cause you’ve been acting like one. Ever think of that? Pitching a fit and calling him old just because he got a girlfriend?”

“He said –” the younger one began, but the older one cut her off.

“I know what he said! I was there! Did it ever occur to you that maybe he was trying to get you to look at him differently?”

The younger girl was silent for a long time. Then, finally, she spoke. “You really think so?” she asked tentatively.

“I know so,” the woman replied. “All he wants is for you to see him as he really is.”

“But I _do_ see him!” the girl responded, anguish in her voice. “You know I do!”

“I know,” the woman replied. “But don’t you think maybe he should, too?”

The girl bowed her head. The woman walked over to her, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder. “He needs to know,” she said softly to her younger self. “You need to tell him.”

“He doesn’t want me,” the girl whispered.

“You don’t think so?” The woman put her hand on the girl’s temple. She focused on the memory of that searing front-porch kiss and pushed with her mind, forcing the memory into the girl.

The girl looked up, then gasped in shock as the memory invaded her mind. From her older counterpart’s point of view, she relived the kiss that Giles had given her – them? – from the moment she’d asked him to kiss her until her ragged intake of breath when it was finally, agonizingly over. She looked up into his eyes, which shone with love for her, and gasped, realizing the truth of the words she’d heard. He really did love and want her. As she came to this realization, though, she was roughly slammed back into unreality and her own body. She reeled, clutching at her older self for support.

“Now,” said the older, “tell me again that he doesn’t want you. Only, make me believe it, okay?”

The younger swallowed hard and nodded. “I’ll tell him,” she said softly. “I swear I will.”

“You’d better,” the older replied laconically. “You’re the only one who can fix this, you know.”

“Me?” the younger whined. “Why me?”

The older sighed. “Because you are the one who’s in a position to change everything. For me, everything’s already happened. I can’t change my past. You’ve got your whole future ahead of you. You can make it different. You can make it so much better.”

The girl bit her lip. “You promise?”

The woman took the girl’s chin and raised it, making their eyes meet. “It has to,” she said softly.

The younger Buffy nodded. “I will,” she promised. “I swear.”

There was a sudden, violent gust of wind. The older Buffy was alone in the nothingness. Dramatic music swelled, thunder crashed, and the light suddenly went out. There was total silence. Buffy rolled her eyes, then sighed into the dark. “Well,” she said softly, “here’s hoping I’m not as much of a jerk as I remember being.”

Then, quite suddenly, another gust of wind blew through the nothingness and Buffy simply blinked out of existence. The wind howled and screamed through the empty space. And Buffy Summers opened her eyes.

“Buffy? Honey, are you all right?”

Buffy put her hand to her aching head. “Oh, God. Mom?”

“Yes, honey, it’s me. Are you okay?”

Buffy blinked. Her mother’s face swam into focus above her and she groaned slightly. “God, what happened? I feel like I got hit by a truck.”

“I heard you fall, so I came downstairs to check on you,” Joyce replied. “There was a glowing shell around you – I couldn’t touch you through it. And then you were you again.”

Dazed, Buffy asked, “Who was I before?”

Joyce pondered how best to explain the situation when she herself didn’t particularly understand it, and her own reactions to the woman who had both been and not been her daughter. “You were… older,” she finally temporized, deciding to save more complicated conversations for daylight hours.

“Oh,” Buffy replied. She pondered that for a moment, and then suddenly her eyes opened wide as the memory of that kiss flooded her mind again, bringing with it all the other memories of the previous two weeks that had been knocked out for a moment by the blow to her head. “Oh!”

Joyce was startled when Buffy pushed herself to her feet. “Buffy?”

“Not now, Mom,” Buffy replied. She kissed her mother on the cheek. “I love you, but I gotta go find Giles.”

Rupert Giles was pacing in his living room. God, that kiss – it had been amazing, and he hadn’t wanted to let her go. He had known that he had to, but part of him had wished that she would push the issue, demand more. God help him, he’d have given it to her. He’d have made it his mission to love her more thoroughly in one night than any man had before in her life, including that bleached-blonde threat to nothing.

He was startled out of his reverie by a knock on his door. His eyes shot to the clock: it was two a.m. Who the hell would be knocking on his door at this hour? He could think of only one answer to that question.

When he pulled the door open, the first thing he noticed was how the moonlight shone on her hair. Then he took in her terrified eyes and realized all in a rush that she was young again. “Buffy…?”

Buffy stepped forward, crossing his threshold, and he backed up. She pushed the door shut behind herself and locked it quietly, then looked up at him. “I love you,” she said softly and without preamble. “I love you and I want you, and I want to be with you.”

He swallowed hard, not quite able to believe she’d said that. “Buffy,” he said quietly. “Do you realize what you’re asking of me?”

“Tell me,” she replied. “No more guessing; no more games. Just tell me, Giles.”

Giles nodded, moving slowly toward her. She took a moment to appreciate the sight of him in emerald and cream before he laid a gentle, warm hand on her cheek. “There are a number of factors to consider,” he said in a low, rich voice. “For one, I cannot be cavalier about a relationship with you. If I make you mine, I will not let you go. For another…” his fingers moved up to brush the center of her forehead at the place Willow had once told her was the location of the Third Eye. “There is a legend which tells of a strange mystical connection which may form when a Watcher and a Slayer join in love. I don’t know much about it – the Council has worked to stamp it out in recent centuries – but there are still whispers about it in dark corners. To bond with you in such a way, Buffy, I would consider to be an honor of epic proportions. But it may be that you would not wish to be tied in such a permanent way to me. There is, after all, young Riley…” he let his voice trail off.

Buffy shook her head. “I don’t love Riley,” she replied evenly. “He knows it. He’s jealous of you because he knows he could never measure up to you. And I wouldn’t mind being bonded to you. I think it would be… nice.”

“Being bound to a man who is… I believe your words were ‘old and gross’?”

Buffy sighed, looking down in shame. “I was jealous, Giles,” she replied finally. “I was jealous and hurt and I wanted to hurt you back. I didn’t mean it, and I hated myself for saying it.” She swallowed. “I… I’ll understand if you… if you can’t forgive me.”

Giles’s hand came under her chin, lifting her face up so that he could look into her eyes. The utter misery that he saw there nearly broke his heart. “Buffy, dearest, don’t cry.” He said softly. “I forgave you for that immediately. You were lashing out, and I knew that. It’s past, Buffy. Let it go.”

She looked up at him hopefully. “Do you… I mean… will you…?”

“Yes, Buffy,” he said softly. And for both the second and first times that night, he bent and captured her lips with his. When he had rendered her sufficiently breathless, he lifted her in his arms, waited until she had wrapped her legs and arms around his trunk, and carried her upstairs.


	13. Plus Ça Change

Buffy’s eyes flew open in the dark as a scream echoed through the house. She took a moment to realize that it had not in fact been her own waking-up-from-a-nightmare scream, only making that realization when the scream echoed out through the house again. She threw the covers off and ran barefoot down the hall, pushing a door open and entering the second bedroom quickly.

“Hey, hey, shh,” she murmured. She leaned over the railing of the bed and lifted a small body in her arms. “Shh,” she whispered again, rubbing the tiny back soothingly. She paced with the slight form in her arms for a few moments, until the screams had quieted to angry little hiccups, then smiled down into not-quite-focused, bright green eyes. “Are you hungry, sweetie?” she asked quietly.

The baby’s response was another furious hiccup and Buffy smiled, reaching up with her free hand to unbutton the man’s work shirt she wore. Then she moved to sit in the big, comfortable rocking chair in the corner and guided the tiny head to her breast. As the greedy mouth latched onto its meal, she looked up to see a large form standing in the nursery doorway. “Hey,” she greeted softly.

“Hello, love,” Giles responded, moving into the room and rubbing slightly at his eyes. “Fell asleep in the Black Chronicles again. Is it snack time already?”

She nodded. “Your son has quite an appetite.”

He smiled proudly at her words, reaching down to gently touch the downy head. The tiny eyes were squeezed shut in an agony of concentration as the small one focused his entire being on his feast. Giles’s hand brushed over Buffy’s, which cupped the baby’s head, and he smiled at her. “Thank you, love,” he said softly.

She smiled up at him. “No. Thank you.”

He leaned over and touched her lips with his. She leaned up into the kiss, a chaste pressing of lips with all the force of their shared love behind it. When they separated, they stared into one another’s eyes for a long time. Giles’s hand came up to brush Buffy’s hair back behind her ear and she leaned into the caress, then looked down suddenly into her son’s wide open eyes. “Hey, Chris.”

Christopher waved a fist at his parents and fussed until his mother switched arms, guiding his head to her other breast. “Little piglet,” she teased him lovingly. He ignored her in favor of sustenance.

“My word,” Giles exclaimed. “He’s certainly hungry!”

“You’re telling me,” Buffy replied dryly.

Giles moved to the side of her, putting his arm around Buffy’s shoulders and watching their son eat until he was full. Then he laid a towel over his shoulder and took the baby, patting his back firmly while Buffy buttoned up her shirt again. The baby resisted manfully for as long as he could before giving forth a milky burp. He was subsequently rather bewildered when both his parents praised him softly, but then he was too busy having his diaper changed to worry about it. After that, his mother picked him up again and held him, which was the part he liked best. She rocked him gently, holding him close and humming softly in her sweet soprano voice, his father’s baritone providing a soothing counterpoint until he was once again sound asleep.

When the baby was laid back in his bed, Giles and Buffy retreated back to their own bedroom. His hands were warm and suggestive on her waist as she led him into the room, and then they tightened convulsively when she gave a muffled shriek of surprise and jumped back into him.

A man was sitting at Buffy’s makeup table, dressed in white linen pants and a similar shirt. He had dark hair and eyes and a Mediterranean complexion. “Buon giorno, ma belle,” the man said in a florid Venetian accent. “It has been a very long time, has it not?”

Buffy pressed herself back against Giles, suddenly feeling very undressed in just her shirt. “What? Who the hell are you?”

“You do not remember me?” the man asked. Very slowly, his form began to shift. It changed into that of an old man, in or near his nineties, with crazy white hair and long, bony fingers. “My dear,” he continued in a British accent. “I am crushed.”

Buffy gasped. “You!”

The man gave a wheezy laugh. “Yes, I, indeed,” he replied. “And how do you enjoy your life now? Any regrets? Any wishes for change?”

“None,” Buffy replied definitely, her hands moving to cover Giles’s on her waist. “I love my life and I wouldn’t change it for anything.”

The old man smiled. “Very good!”

“Who or what are you?” Giles inquired dangerously.

The man stood and bowed. “My name is Mordrek. Destiny demon, at your service.”

“Destiny demon?” Giles repeated.

“Destiny demon,” Mordrek confirmed.

“Boy,” Buffy quipped, “they’ve got a demon for everything these days.”

Mordrek glared at her, then began to speak, his form shifting as he did so until he looked like Luke Skywalker – light saber and all. “Here’s the story. In an alternate timeline of a galaxy not very far from here, the Powers That Be stepped back one day and took a look at the fabric of Fate. When they did so, they found a hole in it. They looked closer at that hole and found that someone or something had somehow been unraveling certain threads and reweaving them in its own image. They knew that something had to be done about that, because the light was being subverted for dark purposes. Enter yours truly, whose job it is to find what’s wrong at the micro level and fix it. Lo and behold, Buffy Summers, it turns out to be you. You, in a little restaurant in Rome, drinking yourself to death slowly because your friends don’t want you around but they won’t let you kill yourself. And so I think to myself, you know, the last time I saw these crazy kids, they were taking down a Hellmouth. What happened? So I start digging and I find out that yeah, somebody’s been tinkering. So I go get approval and I tinker back. You’re a good kid, Buffy. You did better than anybody expected.”

Buffy leaned back against Giles, thinking of the book she’d found in her pillowcase. “I had good help.”

Mordrek nodded. “That you did,” he replied. “So everything’s good now, yeah?”

Buffy nodded. “Everything’s great. I have… everything I could ever have wanted.” She paused, then added, “I have a son.”

“I saw,” Mordrek replied, smiling a little. “Congratulations, kiddo.” Gradually, the destiny demon was becoming transparent as he spoke. “Well, I’d better get back to it. You two crazy kids have a good life, you hear?” With those words, he was completely gone.

Buffy and Giles stood there for a long moment, simply holding one another. Then she turned to face him. “So all’s right with the world,” she said lightly.

“So it would seem,” Giles returned. One of his large hands moved up to gently cup the side of her face and she leaned into the caress, her eyes searching his.

Downstairs, his father’s grandfather clock began to chime the hour. When the twelfth stroke of midnight had faded completely, he smiled down at her. “Happy birthday, love,” he said, stroking her hair back gently with his other hand.

She beamed up at him. “The happiest,” she said simply.

“Are you sure?” he suddenly asked her earnestly. “Buffy, I’m sure you never imagined turning twenty-one married to a man over twice your age and having a four-month-old baby to care for. Tell me: are you truly happy?”

Buffy smiled up at him. “Giles, over the last few years, we’ve been through so much. The other me, my mom getting sick, those crazy monks with their glowy key thing, that goddess that was chasing them, my mom getting well, my mom getting married –” here she paused to roll her eyes dramatically, “– but through all of it, you’ve always been there for me. You’ve been my rock, the one crazy thing in my whole crazy world that makes any kind of sense.” She paused again for a moment, remembering a time when she’d said the same words to another man, a man who could no longer be that for her. Then she laid her hand on top of his. “How could I not love the man who was that for me?” she whispered. “How could I not want his child when that blessing was given to me? How could I resent a life that gives me everything I ever wanted in all the ways I never knew I wanted it?”

Giles felt his breath stop at her exquisite words. He stared down into her eyes for a long moment, and then bent to capture her lips in a tender kiss. She whimpered into his mouth and he deepened the kiss, finding her tongue with his own and caressing it gently. When he released her to look into her eyes, she was nearly vibrating with desire. He moved to cup her face with his other hand as well, both hands on her cheeks now, ducking his head to capture her lips and love her again with his mouth. As her arms came up around his back, he began to simply walk her backwards toward the bed. When he felt her calves bump against the side of the bed he stopped, his hands sliding slowly, worshipfully down her neck to the collar of the shirt she wore – one of his – slowly undoing the buttons along the front of the shirt and pushing the garment open, then pushing it gently off her shoulders. It slithered to the floor with a muffled hiss which was echoed by her when he moved his mouth to the pulse point beneath her left ear and sucked gently.

Her hands gripped his shoulders tightly and she moaned low in her throat as he moved his lips in a sensuous, wet trail down to her collarbone, then across her throat and up the other side of her neck to nibble gently on the scar he found there. His hands were warm on her back, stroking the soft skin gently from her shoulder blades to her waist.

Her hands moved to the buttons of his shirt, flicking them open one by one, her fingers trailing tiny electric shocks through the crisp hairs on his chest, down to his stomach and then around to his back under his shirt, clawing gently, a feather-light preview of things to come. He growled softly against her neck, his hands moving to support her body as he leaned forward, laying her back on the bed. He stood above her and looked down at her for a long moment. God, she was beautiful, with her hair falling down around her, her skin glowing and healthy. She wasn’t as thin as she’d been in the months before her pregnancy and he liked that; he thought she looked better with roundness in her cheeks and softness in her hips.

His hands trailed softly down her body, from her tanned shoulders down around breasts large with motherhood, across the flat plane of her tummy which had so recently housed his firstborn son, and down her long thighs to her knees. He pushed her knees apart gently and knelt between them, pressing gentle kisses to the inside of each thigh, moving slowly upward until he was at her sex. Then he pressed another kiss to the dark curls he found there and looked up into her eyes. “I love you, Buffy,” he said softly.

“I love you, too,” she whispered, her breath already coming faster, and then arched up with a gasp as he moved to devour her tender pussy with his mouth. He stroked her with his tongue, finding all the different, secret places that made her moan and writhe and cry out; he circled her clit with his tongue and sucked it gently, then moved down lower to slide his tongue deep into her channel, gently but insistently holding her thighs apart with his hands as he did so. He’d learned from experience the folly of letting her clamp her legs down around his neck or torso.

She came, crying out his name in an agony of ecstasy. He continued licking her, bringing her down gently until the throbbing of her sex calmed and her cries quieted into soft whimpers. Then he stood, shucked his pants and underwear, and covered her body with his own.

Buffy raised her arms to wrap them around Giles’s torso, pulling him down to kiss her even as she raised her hips, allowing his thick, erect cock access to her body. He slid home within her, both of them groaning in completion as he seated himself firmly inside her and rocked forward slightly more, reveling in the feel of her snug sheath. He bowed his head next to hers, whispering words of love in her ear as he slowly pulled back out and then rocked forward again, delighting in the soft sigh of pleasure that found its way out of her mouth.

They loved slowly, barely moving, just letting the passion and pressure build between their two bodies. Finally, when he couldn’t stand it any longer, he leaned down and gently bit the scar on her neck. Her fingernails clawed into his back and as though a floodgate has been opened, his thrusts began to speed up, becoming wilder, fiercer and faster. Her soft sounds of pleasure became moans and then cries as he drilled into her body deeply, rolling his hips on each upstroke to catch her sensitive clit with his rough hairs.

Suddenly her back arched, her nails digging into his flesh. She let out a wordless cry and came explosively, her walls clenching around him, milking him. He thrust twice more into her rippling channel and then cried out as well, feeling his seed explode from him into her body. He bowed over her, his face buried in her neck, allowing the joy to course through his body.

After a long time, he moved a hand under her back and rolled them both onto their sides, then onto his back. He was still semi-hard, and her body weight kept him buried in her, even though they were both quite satisfied and she was tired; he had noticed that since the baby’s birth she tired easily. He cuddled her to his chest and reached for the blanket, pulling it over them and gently kissing her sweaty temple. “My God, I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she whispered back. “Always.”

Then they both slept. And somewhere on another plane, the Powers That Be smiled, knowing that things had gone right this time around; everything was as it should be and the world was moving once again in its proper course.


End file.
